Galveston — Suzanne Morris

To Galveston, an island in the Gulf of Mexico, comes Claire Becker, a woman who has married a man she does not love and is living out a lie destined to affect many people on a peaceful, shadowed street named Avenue L. For here, shuttered porches and quiet gentilities mask private deceptions that one day spill over into public places: a colossal political struggle aimed at breaking the monopoly that threatens to wipe out the city's whole financial base.

Then, fifteen years afterwards, the same deceits again surface to touch the life of another person on Avenue L. This time they come to menace beautiful Serena Garret, an innocent girl caught in the summer of her prime, who must flee Galveston when the enormities of those lies are almost revealed...then are silenced, seemingly forever, by an act of vengeance and a murder.

But years later, a self-willed daughter of a Houston oil man comes across an old carpetbag and is compelled to begin a journey of discovery that finally exposes the lies which for so long haunted a street in Galveston; and a young woman is at last made free.