The Beach Club

Mack Petersen has managed the hotel at the Beach Club on Nantucket for twelve summers. This summer is different. The owner, Bill Elliot, arrives in spring with a new set of demands, and Mack's girlfriend Maribel is pressing him to marry her.

Mack also has an enemy on staff. Vance, the bellman, has resented him since Mack took his job twelve years ago, and a confrontation between them turns deadly serious.

Other staff members add their own complications. Love O'Donnell, the new front desk clerk, has come straight from the ski slopes of Aspen and is determined to find a stranger to father her child. Jem Crandall, another bellman, once posed as Mr. November in a college calendar. He is bound for Los Angeles to break into talent agenting, until he falls in love with Maribel.

This is a contemporary novel about one summer at a seaside hotel, told through a set of linked personal dramas. It deals in summer romance and in attachment to a place that people return to year after year. The tone is soapy and warm, with some sex scenes. The pressure builds through the season until a hurricane threatens to destroy the Beach Club itself.