Semper Fee

Semper Fee, set in an old-line Boston law firm, is a ribald comic novel about greed, infidelity, betrayal, and worse. Unfolding through two distinctive first-person narratives, the novel explores the entwined but wholly different lives of two partners, Andrew Millard and Eliot Lawrence, rivals since childhood. In their differing ways, the covetous Millard and Eliot, the aging Eagle Scout, betray or simply take for granted the women for whom they've so strenuously competed. However, it is the women who advance and deepen the narrative, delighting, tormenting, illuminating, and invariably controlling the two men. Essential to the lives of both are the incomparable Clare Lawrence and her subversive daughter, Ceci. Semper Fee lays bare the joys and humiliations of desire and tallies the cost of choices made or not made by its two central characters in a claustrophobic universe of unsavory shenanigans.