Emperor Cody Maguire
By Desmond Harding
There is no more intrigue-ridden, back-biting, bitterly contested business than fashion.
Behind the glamour, quality and desirability festers a world with just one aim: power. Where success is measured by one yardstick: money. A world controlled by labels, where egos regularly spin out of control, and snobbery is stitched into every seam.
Into this snake-pit comes Cody Maguire, a boy who fought his way out of the poverty-stricken East End of London to create what some said could be one of the great fashion houses of the world.
But fashion is a fickle business. One moment he is the most sought after fashion designer in London, with every society hostess demanding his presence at their parties, the next he is jobless. His company grabbed by Manfred Strossen, the head-strong son of the super-rich German tycoon, The Great Otto. All part of the wayward off-spring’s plan to escape his domineering father.
Across the Channel, Papillion, the once-great Paris fashion house, faces a bleak future. The beleaguered chief executive, Lowell Adams, needs a saviour, and finds him in the out-of-work Cody Maguire. Together they pull the near-dead company back from the brink of oblivion.
Only to have Manfred Strossen, who thinks it is his God-given right to create the largest luxury goods company in the world, reappear. With nobody questioning his methods or motives, Strossen plans to steal from Cody Maguire a second time. Leaving him to fight, often alone, to save his life’s work…
Emperor Cody Maguire is set in a high-stakes world where style and image is everything, and shows how a world devoted to beauty is in fact ugly and treacherous.
Desmond Harding has been a professional writer all his life. First as a journalist for such papers as the Sunday Telegraph, Glasgow Herald, Yorkshire Post and the Sheffield Telegraph, and then in public relations with some of the largest corporate names on both sides of the Atlantic. He now writes full time from his house in West Cornwall. As a journalist he specialised in business, industry and politics. His time on Fleet Street and with multi-nationals gave him a unique picture of how businesses operate and businessmen behave. His interest in the business world has continued and he now writes thrillers set in that same world.
