The Amateur
by Chris Bohjalian
The mystery in THE AMATEUR (Doubleday, 319 pp., $33) isn’t about who killed Kenny Foster, a young caddy at a snobby suburban country club — it was Mira Winston, an 18-year-old golf prodigy, whose ball slammed into his head at 150 miles an hour in what seems like a freak accident — but about the cascading consequences of this dreadful moment.
It’s a tragedy for Kenny’s distraught family, obviously. But what of Mira, the book’s appealing narrator, whose life is derailed in a different way? (Among other things, she will never pick up a golf club again.) As it turns out, she has a lot more to feel bad about than just Kenny’s death. Though much of it has been caused by the cruel and heedless behavior of other people, she feels responsible. “The guilt ran through me like blood,” she says.
Set in 1978, the story has shades of “The Ice Storm,” with suburban parents so preoccupied by their own recreational activities — alcoholism, affairs — that they’re clueless about what’s going on with their children. It is a time when girls like Mira are sexualized and judged by everyone, including other women.
Bohjalian’s wonderful book is a morality tale, a snapshot of a strange, careless time in a particular slice of America, a psychological exploration of guilt and its repercussions, a portrait of a girl going off the rails — and then, because of an exciting plot twist, a courtroom drama. Maybe Kenny’s death wasn’t entirely an accident after all.
Time to Burn
by Ellery Lloyd
TIME TO BURN (Harper, 306 pp., $30) has many of the things I love about time-travel novels. These include a megalomaniacal businessman who cannot control what he has wrought, thrilling trips into bygone eras and the spectacular violation of Time Machine Rule No. 1: Do not tamper with the past.
Put aside your temporal and technological cavils, and enjoy the ride. Tom Walker, a guide for Tempus Tours in 2026, has just finished leading a group of tourists into London on the evening of March 8, 1941, one of the deadliest nights of the Blitz. It’s quite a trip. German planes drop multiple bombs; one of the travelers is hit by a massive shard of glass and nearly bleeds to death; the group barely makes it back to the travel portal; and — worst of all — one of their number, Sasha Allen, fails to return home.
Back in the present, a filmmaker named Phoebe Hunt is making a documentary about Tempus’s charismatic, healthmaxxing chief executive, Inigo Frank. (He mainlines supplements and swamp-colored juice, and sleeps in “12 intense 15-minute bursts over the course of any given 24-hour period.”)
When the battered, diminished party returns, Phoebe realizes that Sasha is a figure from her own past, a girl she bullied as a child. Both grew up in the Living Family, a utopian community that closed after a catastrophic fire and that was the subject of Phoebe’s most recent film.
That’s when Lloyd’s intricately plotted book gets even more interesting. The action switches back and forth between 1941, where Sasha is seemingly stranded, and multiple crises in 2026, including a sudden temporal glitch that erases a crucial part of a character’s past. Phoebe’s troubled back story, and the mysteries surrounding her childhood, are slowly revealed in scattered excerpts from her Living Family movie. Also, the future of time travel may be in jeopardy.
Marvelously, it all ties together.
Someone Else’s Husband
by Kimberly McCreight
Gretchen Falk, a rich 50-something woman on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, agreed to let her husband, Richard, climb Mount Kilimanjaro with his old ride-or-die college buddies. The trip wasn’t great, as we learn toward the beginning of SOMEONE ELSE’S HUSBAND (Knopf, 352 pp., $30): Among other mishaps, one of the guys plunged to his death off the side of the mountain.
Not only that, but now they’re back in New York, and Frankie Callahan, a hot young New York artist who traveled solo to Kilimanjaro but then joined the climbing party, seems to have been murdered in her studio on the Lower East Side. The prime suspect turns out to be Richard, who was possibly sleeping with her.
McCreight certainly knows her way around the rarefied world of Fifth Avenue, where the Falks live. But the wealth-porn aspects of the story are less interesting than the labyrinthine mystery, told from multiple points of view in multiple timelines. It’s far more complicated than it first appears, and it rewards patience.
Can Richard avoid prison? Who vandalized Frankie’s studio before she died? Why are rich men such entitled jerks? Gretchen isn’t exactly easy to like, but she might be the revelation of the book. “Men always underestimated Gretchen,” McCreight writes, “but she’d learned long ago to use their low expectations to her advantage. When to play demure, and when to bite back.”
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