Two Mrs Grenvilles

Plot

"Dominick Dunne's spellbinding novel tells the story of an ambitious and beautiful woman who propels herself from a Kansas backwater to the heights of New York society and then plummets to the depths of tragedy. One night in 1943, on the dance floor of Manhattan's El Morocco, a showgirl named Ann Arden meets a Navy ensign, Billy Grenvillle, handsome and agreeable, the scion of New York's most aristocratic family. Billy instantly falls in love with this confident, sensual woman, who is so unlike the delicate debutantes who usually pursue him. Much to the disdain and horror of Alice Grenville - the indomitable family matriarch - Billy marries Ann. To the outside world, Ann and Billy Grenville seem "an ideally suited couple", elegantly moving through their transcontinental milieu of dinner parties, soirees, and thoroughbred horse racing. But one rainy night in 1955 on Long Island's Gold Coast, the Grenvilles return home after a violent argument at a party for the Duchess of Windsor. When her husband hears a scream from Ann's bedroom, he rushed in to investigate - and Ann fires a double-barreled shotgun into Billy Grenville's handsome face. The tabloids call it "the shooting of the century". Did Ann mistake her husband for a prowler, as she claimed, or did she really murder him? In the aftermath of her son's death, the imperial Alice Grenville draws a protective veil across the entire tragedy, and the two Mrs. Grenvilles enter into a conspiracy of silence that will bind them together for as long as they live. Years later, on a cruise up the Pacific Coast, a restless and emotionally needy Ann Grenville meets the scandalous author and flamboyant social commentator Basil Plant. At last Basil can fulfil his own ambition - to tear away the veil and uncover the truth about Billy's death that only the two Mrs. Grenvilles know. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles is a novel of intrigue and violent passions that reveals how the rich think and live and how they deal with those who don't belong." -book jacket.