Conscience Point (Hardcover)

New York concert pianist Madeleine Shaye has it all: a thriving career as a television correspondent, a beautiful adopted daughter in college and a longtime love, wealthy Nick Ashcroft. Violet Ashcroft, Nick's sister, first brought Maddy to their crumbling Hamptons mansion during their 1960s college days, when the girls were trying to avoid marriage and follow their artistic passions to Paris. More than three decades later, Violet has long since disappeared in a void of scandal, but Maddy hopes to resuscitate their dream of establishing an artists' colony. Unfortunately, Nick has been acting distant and dropping hints about wanting a child, even though Maddy is pushing middle age. Before long, daughter Laila announces she's leaving Brown to work in a Guatemalan village, a new producer shoves Maddy aside in favor of a younger competitor, and Nick leaves her for another woman. Maddy soon discovers that these upheavals camouflage a crueler betrayal, one that launches her into a winding journey of revenge and renewal. Abeel's middling fifth novel recasts familiar characters and situations on a new stage, but with the exception of vibrant (but underused) Violet offers little that's fresh. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Madeleine “Maddy” Shaye is content with her station in life: her adopted daughter excels academically, just like she did; her husband, Nick, a publisher, who came along later in Maddy’s life, comes from old money, which makes traveling, philanthropy, and leisure possible; and her second career as an arts broadcast reporter brings her considerable acclaim. It’s the late 1990s, though, and soon Maddy feels the breakneck speed of the world leaving her behind. Young hotshots have established new regimes at both her and her husband’s jobs, making her regret that she didn't pursue her dream to be a concert pianist and that she didn’t devote more effort to her marriage. Not to mention that her daughter decides she wants to save the world rather than finish college. As her life unravels, the past rears its head, turning up buried secrets, but Maddy finds strength in her music. Abeel manages both to poke entertaining fun at the silly habits of the superrich and to tell the engrossing, sympathetic story of a superrich woman who turns her back on it all. --Mary Frances Wilkens

Adolescent idealism, sensual satisfaction, and sexual awakening are a powerful mix...a Yankee Brideshead Revisted. --Boston Globe

The plot crescendoes to a melodramatic height as dark secrets are revealed and various betrayals come to light. Abeel manages to tie together those strands in a way that's satisfying…. Maddy is a highly appealing protagonist… --More

Think Waugh's Brideshead, Dickens's Bleak House, and Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Could more drama be packed into one book? --East Hampton Star

Madeleine Shaye is an over-achiever with a dual career as concert pianist and TV arts-correspondent. She adores her college-age daughter, adopted as an infant under murky circumstances, and has a blissful relationship with Nick Ashcroft, scion of a mega-rich, old-money family whose lives have intertwined with hers since college. In short, she is the woman with all the luck. Then her life unravels, and Maddy loses her footing. Her daughter announces she s leaving college to work in Guatemala, hinting darkly at mysterious trouble. And Maddy discovers that Nick has betrayed her in a way she never could have imagined. Mixing heartbreak and Gothic atmospherics with an often comical satire that casts a sardonic eye on high-fliers in New York s artsy set, Erica Abeel has created an intimate drama of a family shadowed by the past. Set in part at Nick s crumbling family estate, Conscience Point is also a mystery that uncovers buried secrets while it plumbs the touchingly human nostalgia for the sort of youthful passion that is seldom equaled in later life. Conscience Point captures the struggles of accomplished baby boomers scrambling to stay afloat in a post-literate age. It offers smart, enlightening descriptions of the world of music and satisfies our prurient hunger to eavesdrop on the almost-too-decadent, consequence-free lives of the super rich. But it s Maddy s tough resilience and her ability to love and sacrifice while making moral choices that remain the emotional core of this taut, clever novel.

Erica Abeel is the author of four books, including the acclaimed novel WOMEN LIKE US, THE LAST ROMANCE, I'LL CALL YOU TOMORROW, OTHER LIES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN and ONLY WHEN I LAUGH, a memoir. A former dancer, Abeel was until recently a professor of French literature at City University of New York. She currently writes film reviews, features and blogs for online magazines.