Charles Parnell Cassidy: a big man, he’d seized hold of everything in life with both hands both to embrace and to squeeze.
He’s become a powerful politician – generous, greedy and cunning. Now, dying, he had left not just a fortune but a deliberately intricate legacy of moral debts and temptation, so that his inheritors had to make the same choices, face the same threats and challenges as he had.  And Cassidy had always had a great faith in human corruptability.