The Winner

by: Teddy Wayne

Goodreads description:

Conor O’Toole has never been anywhere as casually glamorous as Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It’s a sweet deal for the summer: free lodging in a guest cottage in exchange for tennis lessons, luxuriously far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

In this oceanfront paradise, however, new clients prove hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. Then a sharp-tongued divorcée appears, offering him double his usual rate. Soon he realizes Catherine is expecting additional, off-the-court services for her money, and Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he’s experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for the artsy, outspoken girl he met on the beach. Conor somehow finds a way to manage this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne’s unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.

Helen says: 🤓🤓🤓 3/4

Sorry for picking another filthy book. You can tell a man wrote this by the explicitly detailed “sexcapades” in almost every chapter. This book channeled a mixture of The Graduate and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Conor, the main character, really got himself in a pickle! My anxiety heightened as I turned each page…It was very entertaining…not very memorable for the long term though.

Holly says: 🤓🤓🤓

Again, not at the top of my list for this month’s books, but I did keep reading, and I did finish in two days, so that says something…Better title might be Despicable Me (the non-minion version). Yucky, immoral people with delusional, narcissistic and hypocritical behavior who are obsessed with sex and money. The twisted justification of the narcissist is amazing as it unfolds and he goes from “nice guy” to sociopath. A little Ripley-esque.

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