As a girl in the West, Valentine Mackle dodged quicksand along the rivers of the mining camps, but as Mrs. Roderick W. DeVere of New York's Fifth Avenue, Val is sucked into Society's own quicksand in spring, 1899, when a weekend at a country estate in the Hudson Valley turns deadly. Val's "soul sister" drowns on family property, and the host's best "practical jokes" double as death traps.

A Gilded Drowning Pool snarls Val and husband Roddy in a bogus adult health camp, a brothel, a town-and-country pocked with probable killers-and an ambitious police chief convinced that Val and Roddy DeVere played a part in the death that is ruled a homicide.