Bestselling author Laurence Leamer spent the winter season in Palm Beach for over a decade, witnessing from his front row seat the inner workings of this exclusive enclave.

In Madness Under the Royal Palms, Leamer takes readers inside the parties and the clubs, behind the doors of the toniest addresses and into the scandals and the tragedies of some of the wealthiest families in the country.

He writes about the architecture wars -— when the high social value of buying one of the "grand old" homes shifted to knocking those old houses down and the race to build mega-mansions in their place.

As he discovers the desperate hunger a billionaire has for acceptance that may never come, or the aging beauty's struggle to redefine and keep a place in this society, he also captures a pathos and humanity in many of his subjects.

There are characters that range from the doyenne of the modern drawing room who forgoes a marriage with family attending and flies to New Zealand so that Prince Philip and Prince Edward might be present instead; the skinflint billionaire who kidnaps his first children, rewrites his own history, and then plots spectacularly against his fifth wife with a prenuptial that would have her paying him if she leaves; to the small-town daughter of a cop who becomes the gatekeeper for it all, the society columnist for the local newspaper.

As a result of the book's popularity, Leamer has been interviewed by numerous media associations, and has openly discussed touchy subjects including the social psychology of the island's Jewish community, anti-Semitism among the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), the "old money" disdain for new money, including resident and Mar-a-Lago owner Trump, and a tiered caste-type system among the wealthy as reflected in the exclusive clubs.

Leamer has not specifically criticized the Palm Beach Jewish community, but many members have expressed outrage over his comments and have interpreted his words as an ethnic attack.