Gilded: How Newport Became America's Bloodiest Resort

Deborah Davis gives a rather thrilling history of the so-called "gilded mob", a group of trust funded permanent vacationers who got bored with the easy life. They had a taste for rare, exotic, and illegal items including, but not limited to: opium, rhinoceros horns, fossils, ancient Greek artifacts, lizards, and aborigines from far off lands.

The book stresses the fact that this wasn't like the mob stories from New York where people fought for control. These people were in a constant war to prove who was the richest. No doubt it was almost always a proxy war fought by hired thugs no one liked to admit they conspired with, but occasionally the barons and baronesses would get their hands dirty. The topiaries of Newport drank the blood of innocent victims for far too long.