Until a critical weekend meeting at a Heathrow airport hotel in late 2000, the firm had never even held a partners’ meeting. It is hard to overstate how radical an upheaval incorporation in 2001 was for the partnership group at Cazenove. And that mattered if the firm wanted to be competitive in hiring. No, it didn’t need capital, but the dotcom boom was pushing it into a need to incorporate to at least provide tradeable equity. In Pickering’s telling, the pressure to respond to changes in the industry eventually became impossible even for Cazenove to ignore.

The subtext of identity crisis is an appropriate one for Cazenove, which wrestled for decades with the question of how far to follow the zeitgeist and how far to resist it. Time and again Pickering traces the dichotomies: how internal opinions diverged on what Cazenove could or should be, how clients’ views of the firm were often at odds with how its more progressive staff wished to be seen, how UK rivals would fight those staff tooth and nail in contrast with US houses’ confident willingness to tolerate Cazenove’s presence on deals. And that she's the only person in this universe or any universe that can defeat him.But another story, running in parallel with the first, is a tale of corporate identity and how amorphous that can be, shape shifting with the perspective of the viewer. That Schuyler was sent here to defeat Lucifer. He actually remembers the Schuyler she used to be! But he also has a theory, and it's one she doesn't like. Just when she thinks all is lost, Schuyler is contacted by a familiar friend-the Silver Blood, Kingsley. One where Lucifer is alive and well and acting as mayor of New York, Blue Bloods are luring humans to clinics to drain their blood, and Jack is Lucifer's right hand man. As it turns out, Schuyler is not in her New York. Schuyler soon discovers that in this world, her best friend has a different last name, her parents are both alive and well and one of them is an entirely different person, and the love of her life? Not so dead after all. She looks different and feels different and so does everyone else. Only it's not quite the New York she knows, and she's not in her regular body. After defeating Lucifer and sacrificing the love of her life, Jack, Schuyler wakes up back in New York safe and sound. The Blue Bloods are back…more fanged and fabulous than ever.

The blue bloods book series