A Steamy, Noirish New Literary Beach Read

Twenty-five year-old Conor O’Toole, fresh out of New York Law School—not New York University Law School—is spending the first summer of the pandemic on Cape Cod, giving tennis lessons to the one percent. He is a working class kid, out of Yonkers, with a dead father and an ill mother laid off from her secretarial job. Thanks to the generosity of a white shoe lawyer who wants to play better tennis, Conor has his own guesthouse, and he’s grateful for the teaching income and the time to study for the bar. He’s grateful, too, to escape the terror and the slog of COVID-era New York. The rich, he learns, play by their own rules.