One sunlit afternoon, a young girl — illicitly bathing in a stream — first fell in love with a passing stranger. Her parents call her Dorcas, but he called her Campion and that's what she longed to be, then and forever. So when an unbearable suitor is forced on her, she flees to seek her lover, taking with her the one gift left to her by her unknown father — a pendant of gold. There are four of these jewels, each key to a secret, each owned by a stranger. When one person has them all, the holder will have access to great wealth and power. This is Campion's inheritance, one of peril and enchantment.
The dreams of an idle life in the paradise of the Bahamas are shattered when the discovery of a derelict, bullet-ridden yacht brings in the local police and the drug-runners. Nick Breakspear, desperate to escape his famous parentage, invalided out of the Marines, was heading only for peace, but the quixotic impulse makes him take up a challenge - and a lucrative offer - and he allows himself to be hired, for a private war, by a smooth-talking US presidential candidate. And it is the skills drawn from his depised father's world that will enable him to survive.
Alee Walton's love of his daughter, Mary, was the mainstay of his life. Mary was his only comfort during the dark years of the Depression when unemployment and a nagging, ambitious wife gnawed away at his self-respect. His one hope was that Mary would escape from the grinding poverty of the Tyneside slums which had held him prisoner for so many years. But then something happened to Mary which shattered all his dreams for her future- something which was to split a family and dominate its members for generations to follow.
The day Joe Remington brought his new bride to Fell Rise, he had already sensed she might not settle easily into his home just outside the Tyneside town of Fellburn. Making plain her disapproval of Joe's familiarity with the servants, questioning the donation of food to striking miners' families - these objections and more soon rubbed Joe and the local people up the wrong way, a problem he could easily have done without. For this was 1926, the year of the General Strike, the effects of which would nowhere be felt more acutely than in this heartland of the North-East.
A legacy of hatred can be a terrible force in life, over which not even an enduring love and all the fruits of material success may prevail. Catherine Cookson explores this theme in a major novel that will absorb and enthral her readers as irresistibly as any she has written. Roddy Greenbank was brought by his father to the remote Northumberland community of Langley in the autumn of 1807. Within hours of their arrival, however, the father had met a violent death, and the boy was left with all memory gone of his past life.
