The Carousel - Hardcover

In public, Oliver Grey is a devoted father, prominent public figure, humanitarian, and respected businessman. But in private, there's a much darker side to Oliver Grey; a side so dark that someone is driven to kill him...

Though the Greys appear to be an enviable upper class family, they are not without problems. Ian, the older son, is a womanizer and compulsive gambler; Clive, the younger son, is an odd man barely five feet tall with no life outside his work as an accountant; and Amanda, Oliver's niece, whom he raised after her parents died in a plane crash, has been twice divorced and has had a difficult life. Dan, Amanda's brother, is the only Grey who appears to have no problems -- except with his six-year-old daughter Tina, whose behavior reminds him more and more of his troubled sister Amanda.

The trouble had started with Oliver Grey's decision to divide his nationally known business, Grey's Food, among Ian, Clive, and Dan. Amanda, bitter about being left out of the business, arrives from California to straighten out her financial holdings in the company. On a visit to Sally, Dan's wife, Amanda sees a silver carousel much like the one Oliver gave her when she was a child. Sally says the carousel was a gift to Tina from Oliver. Amanda breaks down and tells Sally that Oliver had given her the carousel to keep her from telling the truth about the unspeakable things he had done to her. Sally, horrified by this revelation, finally understands why her daughter has been acting so strangely and why a therapist had raised the possibility that Tina may have been sexually abused. Sally goes to Oliver Grey's home that evening to confront him. And when she leaves he is dead.

Belva Plain breaks new ground in this stunning new novel. A family drama with a strong strain of mystery, The Carousel confirms her standing as one of today's most compelling and popular writers.

breaks startling new ground in her latest spellbinding novel of an American dynasty shattered by secrets and nearly destroyed by greed Reaching into the darkest heart of the most proper and prominent of families, she weaves a fascinating tale of compulsion and revenge.

The Carousel

It couldn't happen to a family like the Greys. Surely, Dan and Sally's troubled five-year-old daughter could not have been molested as the doctor claimed. She was too well guarded for anything like that to happen. But she was destroying their home and their lives.

Meanwhile, the family business was tottering, threatened by dissent from within. The pressure was on to sell family land to foreign investors, a move that divided the Greys and threatened Grey's Foods and the small city in upstate New York it fed.

Oliver Grey, the handsome silver-haired patriarch, bowed out, leaving the business to his two sons, Ian and Clive, and Dan, the orphaned nephew he reared as his own. Ia