{"product_id":"fortunes-spear-hb","title":"Martin Vander Weyer: Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s [2011] hardback","description":"Gerard Lee Bevan was the model of an Edwardian swell - arrogant, smooth, well-connected and highly cultured. He married money and influence - his wife Sophie Kenrick was a cousin of the future prime minister Neville Chamberlain - and over the years he kept a string of showgirl mistresses.  But his was a success built on fraud and deception, and eventually Bevan could sustain the fiction no longer. After a series of desperate swerves, he fled the country on 8 February 1922, abandoning his family and leaving his stockbroking and insurance empire in ruins. Thus began an extraordinary flight across Europe - disguised as a Frenchman, using a stolen passport, with his mistress at his side. His subsequent arrest in Vienna, and the Old Bailey trial that followed, would shock the entire country.  'Fortune's Spear' is a parable of the way in which the prospect of easy money draws risk-takers in every era into a spiral of greed and deceit. Bevan may have been forgotten, but he richly deserves to be remembered. Drawing on c ontemporary evidence and told with novelistic flair, Martin Vander Weyer's gripping biography brings him vividly to life.","brand":"Weyer, Martin Vander","offers":[{"title":"New","offer_id":42044171944121,"sku":"9781907642319","price":4.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0616\/4001\/6057\/products\/weyer-martin-vander-fortunes-spear-hb-9781907642319-32533790851257.jpg?v=1656227353","url":"https:\/\/chaptersbookstore.pro\/products\/fortunes-spear-hb","provider":"Chapters Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}