socialites

Although Ally Hilfiger contracted Lyme Disease at the age of seven, it was not diagnosed until she was eighteen and a patient in a psych ward. Her physical symptoms had been unexplainable for years: joint pain, night sweats, memory loss, nausea, and brain fog. Although she lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, many doctors had failed to find the connection between her symptoms and her environment. The forward to her book is written by her father, Tommy Hilfiger.

Born Betsy Bowen into grinding poverty, the woman who became Eliza Jumel was raised in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse when her mother was in jail. Yet by the end of her life, "Madame Jumel" was one of America's richest women, with servants of her own, a New York mansion, a Saratoga Springs summer home, a major art collection, and several hundred acres of land. During her remarkable rise, she acquired a fortune from her first husband---a French merchant---and almost lost it to her second---notorious vice president Aaron Burr. Divorcing Burr amid charges of adultery, Jumel lived on to the age of 90, astutely managing her property and public persona. After her death, the battle over her estate went all the way to the United States Supreme Court---twice. Family members told of a woman who earned the gratitude of Napoleon I and shone at the courts of Louis XVIII and Charles X. Claimants to her estate painted a different picture of a prostitute, the mother of George Washington's illegitimate son, a wife who defrauded her husband and perhaps even plotted his death. Eliza Jumel's real story---so unique that it surpasses any invention---has yet to be told, until now.

Raised on the posh Upper East Side of Manhattan, Elizabeth Meyer stunned her family and friends when she applied for a position at one of New York's most celebrated funeral homes. The 24-year-old college graduate had interned for designers and PR firms. After planning her own father's funeral, Elizabeth realized she could help others celebrate the lives of their loved ones. Elizabeth saw a market for elaborate funerals and she created the demand for her services by planning unusual funerals for movie stars, musicians, and moguls of all kinds.

After disgracing themselves at a high society New Year's Eve party in Philadelphia in 1944, Madeline Hyde and her husband, Ellis, are cut off financially by his father, a former army colonel who is already ashamed of his son's inability to serve in the war. When Ellis and his best friend, Hank, decide that the only way to regain the Colonel's favor is to succeed where the Colonel very publicly failed--by hunting down the famous Loch Ness monster--Maddie reluctantly follows them across the Atlantic, leaving her sheltered world behind. As she embraces a fuller sense of who she might be, Maddie becomes aware not only of the dark forces around her, but of life's beauty and surprising possibilities.

Event planner Isabel Serranti's latest client happens to be Simon Monkwell, a former classmate who enjoyed taunting Isabel as a child, but as she begins planning the event, she finds herself drawn to Simon, who seems to have grown more mature, and handsome, in the years since Isabel last saw him.

Yankee Silas Lapham, a self-made millionaire, attempts to crash Boston's old-guard, aristocratic society.

In 1913 New York, a young Harvard graduate set to inherit a fortune from his grandfather marries and embarks on a life of alcohol and indulgence, assuming that he and his wife will soon be wealthy, but falls into self-destruction and despair when the money does not come through.