All That Glitters

All That Glitters is a novel by the American writer V. C. Andrews, published in 1995. It is the third book in the Landry family series.

The series follows Ruby Landry from the Louisiana bayou to the New Orleans mansion of the Dumas family, and this book opens with her back in a shack in the bayou with her daughter Pearl, having been forced out of the house she had been brought into. Ruby wants a settled life for the child and finds instead that the Dumas family's grip on her does not depend on her living under their roof, and that the history she has been uncovering across the first two novels is not finished with her. Andrews writes these books in the first person and builds them out of the miseries families keep from one another, with inherited money, illegitimate claims and sexual secrets doing the work that a monster would do in another kind of horror novel. The financial and emotional precariousness of a young mother with no allies is the constant of the book.

Andrews died in 1986 and the novels published under her name afterwards were written from her outlines and notes, which is why the series continued past her lifetime.