A dangerous fortune - Ken Follett

A great family of merchant bankers, infected by the poison of ambition and greed. For the Pilasters, sex and love are weapons in a war for power and wealth. One explosive secret becomes the weak link that can bring down a dynasty.

In 1866, tragedy strikes at an exclusive public school. A pupil drowns in a mysterious accident involving several boys. Among them ate young High Pilaster; his cousin Edward, the weak, dissolute heir to the Pilaster banking fortune; and Micky Miranda, the darkly handsome son of a brutal South American landowner. The drowning and its aftermath initiate a spiralling circle of treachery that will last three decades and entwine many lives...

Spanning the years when an empire tightens its grip on a faraway world and revolution begets a tide of violent change, A Dangerous Fortune portrays a family bound inexorably by a shared legacy, and brings us men and women swept towards a perilous climax where greed, fed by the shocking truth of a boy's death, must be stopped - otherwise not just one man's dreams, but those of a nation, will die.