Good As Gold

Edie Quentance is the ugly duckling in a family of charming conformists. For generations, Quentance Bank has managed the wealth of its rich and aristocratic clients, and when Edie is pushed into joining the family bank, she finds the work very dull indeed. She passes the time trying to uncover the truth about her great-grandfather Kit, whose love of the sea she has inherited. Kit Quentance was rumoured to have carried a fortune into the Titanic lifeboat with him – money that has never been found.

Edie’s excavations in the family archive unearth some shocking and far more recent secrets. She realises that Quentance Bank is not the paragon of old fashioned probity it pretends to be. As she tries to right her family’s wrong-doings, Edie’s position becomes increasingly dangerous. Her twin brother, her parents, her uncle – she no longer knows whom she can trust.

LOUISE PATTEN has worked in business since 1977, first in the banking world and then with strategy consultants Bain & Company. While still in her thirties, Louise broke through the corporate glass ceiling to become a main board director of her first FTSE 100 company. She has served on a number of multi-national Boards, not only as a Director, but also as one of the tiny handful of female chairmen of major UK businesses.