cover image Blood Rich: When Oil Billions, High Fashion, and Royal Intimacies Are Not Enough

Blood Rich: When Oil Billions, High Fashion, and Royal Intimacies Are Not Enough

Jane Wolfe. Little Brown and Company, $22.95 (346pp) ISBN 978-0-316-95092-3

Chronicling the rise and fall of the Sakowitz family of Houston department store renown in this tale about life among the miserable rich, the former society editor of the Dallas Morning News offers few thrilling revelations. Despite Wolfe's efforts to keep the tale lively, the story of the making and breaking of the Sakowitz fortune and its cast of unappealing characters with their unpleasant marriages, divorces, connivances, venomous internecine vendettas and court fights, which may have enthralled Houston society in the late 1980s, do not translate into a page - turner here. Even gossip about the affair between Fergie, the Duchess of York, and Steve Wyatt, one of the players in the Sakowitz story, comes off lamely. Ditto the plentiful intrigues in the Texas oil industry, the detailed description of the clothes worn by Sakowitz heir, Lynn Wyatt, and the hint--unpursued--of a murder. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)