Excerpt from Bad Paper by Jake Halpern, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Herb's own marriages were tumultuous. He married and divorced three times, though not all of his separations were bitter. His second wife, for example, subsequently took a job as his bookkeeper. His third wife, Aaron's mother—Joyce Siegel—actually started off as a client. When she first met Herb, she was in the midst of a divorce, and Herb's office was representing her. Initially, Joyce was working with another lawyer at the firm, but when she broke down in tears, the lawyer summoned Herb for help. This was Herb's specialty—he knew how to handle even the most distraught of clients. He walked in, told her to stop crying, and took over her case. "Herb usurped the client in more ways than one," Joyce recalled.

Joyce says that she was initially drawn to Herb because he had the aura of a "man about town." "You know how women are. They like power and money, and, in the situation I was in, I didn't have any of that." They eventually married, but Joyce says it was rocky from the start because Herb would stay out late, leaving her at home, worrying—and then simmering. "I reached a point where I wouldn't even leave the porch light on for him. I was really hoping, secretly, that he'd fall and break his neck or crash on the way home. Then he would come home, he'd [usually] been drinking—I'm sure he'd been with women—and he would go into the bedroom to wake up Aaron." At the time, Aaron was an infant and Joyce says she would plead with her husband, unsuccessfully, to let Aaron sleep. "I'd hear Ari"—her nickname for Aaron—"in there, tossing and turning, trying to get back to sleep. He was such a good little boy. He wasn't a crier."

As his law firm continued to prosper, Herb began looking for a new, grander home for his family within the city's historic district around the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. One day, he and Joyce went to see a gorgeous old mansion on Soldiers Place, one of the city's most prestigious addresses. The house, situated kitty-corner from a mansion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, was a stately edifice built in 1905. It boasted seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, and more than five thousand square feet of floor space. During their initial tour of the house, Joyce was unconvinced: "I remember being up in the room on the third floor, in what was like a pool room, and I was thinking, 'God, I don't know, this is so big.'" Then, without consulting his wife, Herb said to the agent, "We'll take it."

Aaron speculates that his father purchased the mansion with the intention of flipping it whenever the opportunity arose. "I think he probably put it on the market as soon as he bought it," says Aaron. "No sentimental attachments there—that's how he is." When Herb finally did sell the house, more than two decades later, the buyer was the Canadian government, which wanted a suitable home for the head of its consulate. Herb sold the house for an enormous profit. When he inked the deal with the Canadians, Herb was amused to see that the contract bore the seal of the British Crown. "He ripped off the Queen of England," said Aaron. "That doesn't happen every day."

As the years passed, Joyce became increasingly unhappy with her marriage and the family dynamics at Soldiers Place. She eventually ended the marriage and moved out of Soldiers Place, leaving Aaron and Shana—who wanted to stay in their childhood home—behind. The house was never the same after that. What ensued was the much-idealized scenario that many an American teenager has dreamed of: a mansion stocked with food and liquor, a permissive father, and an open-door policy for friends and classmates. Shana recalls this time in her life with great nostalgia: "I would say to my dad, 'I'm having thirty couples here before the date dance, and I expect you not to come home for the whole night.' And he'd be like, 'Okay.'" It was a dream come true for Shana: "We're fifteen years old and we're all sitting around drinking champagne in this grand house."

Excerpted from Bad Paper by Jake Halpern. Copyright © 2014 by Jake Halpern. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.