It was also made into a successful serial for BBC Radio 4, and was later televised in 1990 by the BBC. Jeffrey Archer, whom I remember as "the storyteller in the class of Dumas" from one of his early blurbs, is still going strong. As for me, I will be starting 'Mightier Than the Sword' just as soon as I press the 'submit' button at the bottom of this review .

Don Pedro Martinez, a powerful new enemy of the Cliftons, uses his company shares in an attempt to place a hand-picked candidate in the chairmanship.Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer's Be Careful What You Wish For opens with Harry Clifton and his wife Emma rushing to hospital to learn the fate of their son Sebastian, who has been involved in a fatal car accident. Hardcastle’s first decision is who to support to become the next chairman of the board: Emma Clifton or Major Alex Fisher? Hardcastle is the Chairman of the Farthing Bank and he will join forces with the Barrington’s to try and thwart Don Pedro Martinez and his sons.

The suspense builds through the entire book and then on the last page (the same in each book), you are left hanging - impossible to imagine the fate of your favorite characters. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. You really do have to start with the first in the series, it's no good trying to read them out of sequence, but it's so easy to become immersed in the plot that you don't want to put it down. Emma resolves to fill his spot but is stalled by Martinez, who nominates one of his men, Major Alex Fisher, to sabotage the firm during this critical moment. Remorseful that he failed to act in time to avert her suicide, and now aware that Martinez has been trying to sabotage the company, Hardcastle teams up with the Barrington family to help defeat him.

As they reached the outskirts of Harlow, Emma glanced out of the side window to see a signpost directing them to the Princess Alexandra Hospital. Reaction to the Clifton Chronicles has not been unanimously positive—Archer has his detractors—but if you like multivolume family sagas, it would be hard to find a contemporary example as ambitious and entertaining as this one. The Queen Mother, having been properly addressed earlier as Your Majesty, is then described as HRH the Queen Mother. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. He decided this was not the time to tell him the good news, but simply asked Harry to pass on his heartfelt condolences to Emma.

When Harry checked out of the Pierre Hotel forty minutes later, he found Harold’s chauffeur standing on the sidewalk waiting to drive him to Idlewild airport. But, a very big but, this episode in the seemingly endless Clifton chronicle, really is rather well put together. Back in London, Harry and Emma's adopted daughter wins a scholarship to the Slade Academy of Art where she falls in love with a fellow student, Clive Bingham, who asks her to marry him. The story starts exactly where the last left us and continues the story of all the characters we have come to love in the Clifton Chronicles. She might not have agreed to take his place if she’d realized that he would be back in England the following day.

This series of stories (originally meant to be a trilogy but now into the fourth and with a fifth yet to come) has had its ups and downs. Similar to the previous books, the Barringtons/Clifton's constantly try to thwart the devastating blows that are thrown their way by ruthless people who only want to see their demise. Once I was able to give this book my attention it took barely a day to finish - which is a credit to the authors writing style and the pace that he sets in the book.