Power Play: A Novel
In peak form, Steel examines the effects of power on the lives of male and female CEOs in this insightful, all-too realistic novel. Divorcée Fiona Carson has only two priorities in her life: her two children and her corporation. Other than those focuses, her life might as well be spent in a convent. Her concern at the moment is finding the person on her board of directors who is leaking sensitive information to the press. CEO Marshall Weston is her opposite. He splits his out-of-office time between his two families: his wife and his three nearly grown children and his mistress and their seven-year-old twins. Marshall is able to keep all the balls in the air until a cancer-surviving former employee claims he bedded her and then fired her, and she’s ready to tell her story to the press. Suddenly Marshall is on the denial trail, trying to keep his private life from imploding. Steel forthrightly juxtaposes the private lives of Fiona and Marshall to dramatize just how differently men and women handle corporate power and personal responsibility. --Pat Henshaw