In Fierce People by Dirk Wittenborn (Bloomsbury), fifteen-year-old Finn Earl aches to enter the privileged, self-indulgent world inhabited by the billionaire Osborne family and their wealthy friends. One minute he’s trying to cover up his mother’s drug addiction and the next he’s the newest resident of an exclusive New Jersey town reserved for the rich and famous. Though Finn is a have-not (his mother is Osborne’s personal masseuse) his enthusiastic na?vet? endears him to the tycoon and his granddaughter. It may seem like the good life, but when Finn closes in on the family’s brutal secrets, there is hell to pay. The dangerous allure of the rich is an old theme, but Fierce People is a deliciously decadent take on the excess of high society in the seventies.