Published in 2022
9 hours and 7 minutes
Claire Prentice is the bestselling author of Doctor Ice Pick, Miracle at Coney Island and The Lost Tribe of Coney Island. Her new work, Curse of Riches (an Audible Original), tells the epic true story of the Wendels, Gilded Age New York’s most dysfunctional family.
Claire’s work uncovers hidden histories and the compelling, flawed characters at the center of them. She is passionate about medical history and recently completed a University of Oxford course on the subject.
In the words of the New York Times best-selling writer Abbott Kahler, “Prentice has a reporter’s nose for a good story, and a novelist’s flair for telling it.”
Claire lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
What is this book about?
How did the Wendels, one of New York’s most famous Gilded Age families, disappear from history?
The Wendels built a fortune from New York real estate, and rubbed shoulders with the Astors, Vanderbilts, and Stuyvesants. But as the 19th century came to an end, the Wendel family tore itself apart with a series of high-profile sibling squabbles, accusations of insanity and promiscuity, false imprisonment, and unseemly legal battles over love and money.
Following six years of painstaking archival research, Claire Prentice has prised open the door of the Wendels’ Fifth Avenue mansion—dubbed “the house of mystery” by the press—to reveal a fascinating and dysfunctional family imprisoned in a gilded cage.
It’s a true tale stranger than any fiction, filled with vivid characters who struggle to find happiness in a world of unimaginable wealth, and a secret love story between master and maid.
In the words of one reporter writing in 1926, “You would have to go back to the works of Dickens to find a tale as curious and fascinating as that of this old mansion and its occupants.”
