If you were to read this with your eyes closed (you might find yourself doing just that) to the author credit line, there might be times when you could wonder if this were Harold Robbins. It's a big schlockbuster with a California background, a dynastic family novel which begins in the 19th century when one Cassius Brennan married a Maria Villanueva.

Well, as they say, the apple never falls far from the tree and some of them were rotten--particularly by the time you get to Cham Brennan, a souse, who is wet-nursed through life by his Negro maid-mistress Lagonda and never gets over his incestuous attachment to his sister, Cissie. He also cannot quite get over the imprint made by Grandpa Lucius (the original Cassius brother), the dominant gene of the Brennans. He left the motto "Aside from gathering wealth no other diversion compares to venery."

Well, this goes on long enough so that by the end you've forgotten what happened at the beginning--Cham is sipping bourbon milkshakes by the television set; Cissie dies in a plane crash; she leaves a daughter who inherits the family fortune but gives it up in order to marry a man who refuses to be only a stud.... None of it ever rises above calculated mediocrity even though it reads along and is written in that universal lingua franca of sex. Kirkus Reviews