The Fortune

THE FORTUNE is the story of a great love between a beautiful young woman and an older man.

The young woman is Alexa Walden, whose glamorous New York single life---a fast-track job, a nice apartment, expensive clothes---conceals a tragic past.

The older man is Arthur Aldon Bannerman, head of America's richest family, perennial candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, philanthropist and art collector on the grand scale.

The Bannerman fortune is legendary; the Bannerman name is magic; the Bannerman family lives in its own secret world of unimaginable wealth and power. Thus, when Arthur Bannerman, at the age of sixty-four, dies in the bed of a young woman of twenty-four, the scandal makes headline news---and soon pits Alexa Walden against the Bannerman family itself, for control of The Fortune.

In THE FORTUNE, Michael Korda, the best-selling author of QUEENIE and CHARMED LIVES, takes the reader into the world of great inherited wealth. The Bannerman Family's country house in America, set in thousands of acres; the Bannermans control so many banks and corporations, so much real estate, that they have long since lost track of precisely what they own; and even though three generations of Bannermans have funded innumerable museums, foundations, hospitals and other charitable institutions to erase the memory of the ruthless robber baron who created The Fortune, the more money they give away, the faster The Fortune grows....

Alexa Walden has only one desire: to carry out the wishes of the man she loved. But that is enough to plunge her into a bitterly contested battle with his family----a battle in which the secrets of her own past soon become deadly weapons in the hands of her enemies, and in which her very life may ultimately be at stake.