Winner Takes All (1990)

Vanessa Drucker's novel, published by Crown in 1990, is set at Cheltenham, Arbuthnot & Crewe, a two-hundred-year-old Wall Street law firm whose gray-flannel tradition, the jacket says, is being incinerated in the heat of 1990s mega-dollar deal making. Peter Courage, a fifth-year associate educated at Choate, Princeton and Columbia, uncovers the private purpose behind the finance partner Ariel Lamb's plan to revolutionise the fiscal world, while the associate Gina di Angelo joins the firm; Courage's own pursuit is Michelle Peterson, a vice president at the investment bank Caroline Brothers. (Open Library)

Watches

Cartier (unidentified model): At an all-night closing session in a conference room full of half-comatose bankers and lawyers, Courage, trying to talk to Michelle Peterson about anything but letters of credit, steals a look at the Cartier watch strapped on her tiny, blue-veined wrist: four thirty-nine in the morning. Much later, in her apartment after a closing dinner, she glances at the Cartier again to work out that they have about an hour before she must sleep, and proposes a game of Executive Monopoly. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Courage stole a look at her Cartier watch, strapped on a tiny wrist streaked with pale blue veins. Four thirty-nine. Would the night never end? (Vanessa Drucker, Winner Takes All, scan cataloged as Crown, 1990, p. 20; she glances at the Cartier watch on p. 191; her full name and bank are on pp. 12 and 17; Internet Archive scan OCR)