LOYALTIES

It's saga time again in Ellis land: here, the author of A Daughter's Promise, Rich is Best, and The Only Sin (among others) tells the story of a dynastically overwrought clan of timber barons--with pure balsa wood results. The featured lumber ladies are cousins Annie Lazarus and Felicia Harris, fated to replay a game begun in the last century by their ancestors, Naomi and Rachel Sachs. Old Naomi apparently swindeled her sister Rachel out of both a husband and an inheritance, and then went on to found an industry titan, Miller Timber. But many decades later, the old girl's will proves a shock, stipulating that gold-plated Felicia must run the company jointly with her long-lost cousin from Georgia. At corporate headquarters in San Francisco, the two young women find they've nothing in common--except the accountant, Glenn Rogers, who summarily dumps Annie the minute Felicia bats her eyelashes at him. Meanwhile, good-hearted Annie marries a conservationist and struggles to turn Miller Timber into the Sierra Club, and Felicia fells as many American forests as she can to underwrite her designer wardrobe. After 20 years of battling it out in the boardroom, Felicia turns her hand to blackmail to gain full control of the firm, and succeeds--which leaves her rich and powerful, and Annie just rich and righteous. A forest of flimsy characters and unlikelihoods.