A Dangerous Fortune

This book is a wonderful page turner. It is both perfectly plotted, and contains rich and believable characters. I also found there to be an underlying humor to the book that tempered the darkness of some of the characters. Once I started it, I resented having to put it down, and finished it in nearly 24 hours.

Another Ken Follett classic. A great read into the class system of Victorian England and the banking system. Don't let that turn you off. This is intriguing, characters are well developed and the you will not be able to put the book down.

The cousins find themselves locked in a vicious competition for the top job at the band. But the respectable veneer of the family, and even Victorian England itself, looks to shatter as the deadly event from their schooldays threatens everything the family has built.

This is a quite unremarkable, moderately entertaining work of fiction set in late 19th century England. As with another of Follett's works, A Place Called Freedom, it has little to recommend it over dozens of other similar novels set in the period.

The plot revolves around the Pilasters, a wealthy and contentious banking family, whose various branches struggle for control of the family business. Subplots involving a fictitious South American country and members of the British "underclass" bring some spice into the history. However, as with A Place Called Freedom, the most striking aspect of the novel is its utter predictability. Twists in the story become strikingly obvious scores of pages in advance.

I would rate this novel slightly show more above the aforementioned A Place Called Freedom, but both pale in comparison to Follett's two novels Pillars of the Earth and World Without End. Readers familiar with those works will likely be disappointed with this effort. show less

Good tale of family conflict and tensions set around the late 1800s English banking scene. Not as thrilling as some of his work but interesting character development, especially Augusta as the manipulative wife of one of the bank partners and matriarch of the family.

I listened to this book, which I feel made in more interesting. It sure had a lot of sex, but other than that, there was excellent characterization and kept a fast moving pace. I could figure out some of it, and there were enough twists and turns to keep us listening. My husband and I listened to it on a car trip, and both of us enjoyed it. No small feat.

This was like watching a soap-opera on BBC. Illegitimate children, loveless marriages, evil, scheming women and men, murders, white knights and bad girls with hearts of gold. All of this is in this book and more. It does go ON quite a bit and everything ties up neatly in the end. All in all, I'd say it was entertaining, but , after finishing it, I felt like I always do after eating an entire pan of brownies. Why in the world did I do that?