The Amateur

When a young woman, a golf prodigy, accidentally kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs, predatory men, and a teenager on trial in this spellbinding novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant. 1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a practice ball from her tee with a wooden club. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, travels 150 miles per hour for fifteen yards and slams, with sickening force, into the forehead of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, causing a traumatic rupture in the frontal lobe of his brain. Kenny brings his right hand to his forehead, then topples to his side. He is dead before the ambulance even arrives. In the wake of this terrible accident—and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident—Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man forty years her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own.