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. In the dead caddy’s little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when Henry Fallows, the golf pro, looks more closely at the torn net, when the detective investigating the case recalls Mira’s history of recklessness, and when Kenny’s father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a district courtroom, The Amateur What happens when one small moment—a swing, a ball, a piece of string—changes the course of an entire life?

This was a great read. It’s been a while since I’ve come across anything quite like it.

Mira Winston is an eighteen-year-old golf prodigy with plans to attend Yale in the fall. One afternoon during practice at her country club, a ball she hits tears through a worn out net and strikes a young caddie, a classmate of hers, named Kenny, and kills him. What starts out as a horrific, freak accident quickly turns into something much darker once the community learns that Mira’s been secretly involved with a married man decades older than her. She also has a temper problem. Rather than judge the married man, the public paints her as an entitled, spoiled, temperamental and manipulative young woman manipulative one. Soon, questions start swirling about whether she tampered with the practice net before the accident happened. Between the mounting suspicion, the class tension between her family and Kenny’s, and a police investigation closing in, Mira eventually finds herself facing criminal charges over Kenny’s death.

I liked the structure of this book a lot. It’s written almost like a memoir, told years later by an older Mira who’s since become a published author looking back at the summer that changed everything for her. That framing gives the whole story an almost confessional quality, since we’re getting this not as it happens but through the lens of someone who’s had decades to sit with what happened to her and finally reclaim her own version of events.

The mystery around what actually happened to the net and who might have been responsible for tampering with it, kept me hooked throughout. But this book is about a lot more than just that central mystery. It dives deep into class dynamics between Mira’s wealthy family and Kenny’s working class one, substance abuse, and the way an entire community can turn on a young woman while barely questioning the adults around her. The finger pointing throughout was uncomfortable at times, and the book does a great job showing how quickly sympathy can curdle into blame once people decide someone doesn’t fit the mold of an innocent victim.

Pacing wise, the book moves steadily between the accident’s immediate aftermath and the courtroom drama that follows, and the memoir style narration kept me completely engaged the entire way through. Mira’s voice as an older woman looking back gives the story depth, especially once the full truth of what happened that day finally comes out.

This is well written and genuinely captivating from start to finish. If you’re drawn to character driven fiction that tackles class, trauma, and the double standards women face, I would definitely recommend this one.