• the youngest son of a crime boss inherits his empire by assassinating his two worst enemies, and returns from a brief exile to marry a woman he doesn’t love, who becomes the victim-heroine of the ensuing trilogy;
• a radical journalist hits on a bored dentist’s wife who fancies herself an artist, persuades her to move to Greenwich Village with him, whereupon she eventually tries to rescue him from a revolution by stowing away on a freighter in mid-winter and skiing across Finland;
• a lady of means moves to Africa to raise coffee on a plantation, treats “her blacks” a tad nicer than her neighbors do, and cheats on her husband with a man who has nothing to offer her but his good looks and a bi-plane;
• a dowdy middle-aged daughter of a backwater minister takes up with a drunken sailor and goes on a riverboat adventure with him to try and blow up a gunboat, meanwhile persuading him to shave and quit drinking;
• a teenaged girl hires a drunken law-man to track down her father’s killer, and meanwhile tries (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to shave and quit drinking;
• an idealistic young schoolteacher moves to China and falls for a lonely Navy engineer, whose best friend dies of hypothermia while jumping ship to try and save his girlfriend from her oppressors, and himself along with most of his shipmates is killed trying to rescue the schoolteacher from a civil war, who of course survives;
• the spoiled daughter of a Georgia farmer who won his plantation in a card game, uses up one man after another to try and save the farm after his death, and all the while despises men, children and “darkies” and her own best friend whose husband she covets shamelessly, but as God is her witness, she’ll never go hungry again….

Oh, and there’s lots more where those came from….