No Greater Love

Strong and consistently absorbing, this romance by a master of the genre ( A Daughter's Promise ) seizes the reader's interest immediately. Harry Newhouse and Katie Freeman marry as idealistic teenagers in 1923 and move from New York City's Lower East Side to a small farm in Texas. Harry, shrewd and headstrong, begins to make a fortune in the stock market; although Katie is uneasy at spending their money freely, the couple enjoys a gilded lifestyle, plying their two children, Leo and Joanne, with luxuries. Misfortunes begin when Harry loses everything in the crash of '29; a family tragedy then leads to Harry and Katie's divorce and precipitates permanent estrangement from their daughter. Harry turns to a new career in the grain business and enters an unsatisfactory marriage with a young, calculating woman while Katie, with a string of enterprises, becomes one of the country's most successful entrepreneurs. Ellis's prodigious story-telling skills overcome some contrived turns in the plot to deliver both vivid settings and characters to care about. (Jan.)