Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Decades after the events that occurred during her teenage years in the 1970s, prolific author Mira Winston writes her first memoir about the summer when a freak accident killed a classmate and the revelations about her affair with an older man ended a marriage. Mira was that rare bird, a teen female golf phenom. Little girls around the upscale Westchester country club wanted to be her; the older male members wanted to do her. Theo Catton was of this group, seducing Mira when she was only 15 and keeping her in his thrall for three years. The day she hit a powerful drive off the practice tee that tore through the green’s protective net and pierced the skull of caddy Kenny Foster, Mira became both villain and victim. After she was criminally charged for Kenny’s death and vilified as a home-wrecker, Mira faced a future that plummeted from potential golf superstardom to defendant in a murder trial. The psychic whiplash was life-threatening. Given the ubiquity and misery of the ongoing fallout from the Epstein scandals, best-selling and always intrepid Bohjalian (The Jackal's Mistress, 2025) demonstrates timely and empathic socially conscious bravery as he confronts the inherent imbalance of power in such situations and illuminates the devastating impact of such exploitation.

Publishers Weekly
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A freak accident at a Westchester County, N.Y., golf course derails a young woman’s life in this powerful domestic thriller from Bohjalian (The Jackal’s Mistress). In August 1978, fiery 18-year-old LPGA hopeful Mira Winston is driving balls into the Tallmadge Country Club’s practice net when a shot blasts through the mesh and kills 17-year-old caddy Kenneth Foster. Mira’s mother urges her to focus on her impending start at Yale, where she’ll almost certainly make the golf team; a distraught Mira, however, wants nothing more to do with golf or, by association, college. Mira becomes convinced Kenny’s death is karmic punishment for her multiyear affair with a married 40-something man—particularly after Kenny’s father discovers the relationship and tells Mira’s parents. But when Mira’s temper and alleged moral turpitude make her a suspect in the practice net’s apparent sabotage, she fears she has only begun to pay. Styled as an unflinchingly candid memoir written by Mira decades after the fact, Bohjalian’s latest dazzles as it devastates. Plentiful foreshadowing ramps up tension and keeps the momentum high while Mira turns over weighty subjects—sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress, familial dysfunction—with grace and wry humor. It’s a masterpiece. Agents: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneide. (Aug.)

Library Journal
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Bohjalian (The Jackal's Mistress) delivers again with this suspenseful novel set in the late 1970s in an affluent suburb of New York City. Golf prodigy and recent high school graduate Mira plans to attend Yale, with assurances that she will make the college golf team. On a hot August day, she works on her drives at the country club's practice net. A flaw in the net allows a golf ball through to hit and kill Kenny, a schoolmate of Mira's who was waiting near the caddy station, hoping for more work for the afternoon. This freak accident leads to an investigation into the faulty net, the country club, Mira's relationship with a married man, and her past reckless behavior. The pivotal details are revealed at a good pace, and Mira is well drawn as a full human being, neither total victim nor total villain, but instead a complicated young woman figuring out her life. VERDICT This provocative story about the repercussions from one chance moment raises questions about predatory men, class divisions, and substance abuse. It is an engrossing read that will offer much discussion for book clubs.—Jennifer Alexander

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

An accident at the golf course cuts short one life and totally upends another. “At fifteen, I couldn’t outdrive the very best men’s players at the club, but I still beat all of them most of the time. My short game was as precise as a drone strike, and I was excellent on the greens.” Mira Winston is an unusually confident and self-aware teenager, and her voice on the page is irresistible. (As we will later learn, the narrator of Bohjalian’s 25th novel is herself the author of 25 novels, so perhaps it’s no surprise her storytelling skills are as impressive as her golfing.) Mira’s fictional memoir revolves around the events of Aug. 3, 1978, at a country club in New York’s Westchester County. It was her senior summer; she was 18 and on her way to Yale in a matter of weeks when a ball she smashed into the practice net went through the mesh and out the other side, hitting and instantly killing a young caddie named Kenny Foster as he was waiting to be called to carry bags. The accident has dramatic results, both immediately and over the next few years: Mira doesn’t matriculate at Yale, she never plays golf again, and in an unexpected twist, it’s revealed to one and all that she’s been having an affair with a man named Theo Catton, who’s her father’s age, and with whom she’s been involved since she was 15. Mira is well aware of the resemblance between her story and Lolita’s—she will later get a line from the novel tattooed on her forearm—but she also now understands that the younger her was sorely misled about her own agency and motivations. As the small-town drama simmers, as Mira and her parents self-medicate with drugs and alcohol, as Mira eventually comes to trial—the story is spun by then as “privileged rich girl with too much attitude recklessly kills a poor student with so much promise”—a marvelous 11th-hour twist and a satisfying denouement lie ahead. It’s hard to think of any reason not to call this a perfect novel: a hole in one. Nabokov’s classic reinvented as a 1970s moral fable, with brilliantly developed characters and period detail. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.