Beauty — Gloria Nagy

When the two women closest to him die within a week of one another, John Duckworth, ex-crime reporter and full-time cynic, must come to grips with his own closed-off emotions as well as the weight of his family's past.

Part Yankee aristocrat and part "wharf rat" Irishman, John Duckworth cares for only four things in life: his kind but emotionally fragile sister, Faith; her precocious daughter Penelope; his feisty Irish grandmother; and Newport, Rhode Island, his hometown.

But New York is also the setting for Nagy's novel; and it's a struggle to hold on to the things he loves in a city which disorients-a city of hypocrisy, arrogance and greed-and when a new life beckons for John and Faith on Cape Cod, they jump at the chance, transforming an old ruin into a new hotel-the Inn at the Edge. They have no idea, however, of the chilling villain awaiting them in Jasmine Jones, a beauty beyond compare who walks into their inn the first week of business and doesn't leave until their lives and loved ones are utterly destroyed.

The Beauty is a novel of this moment with the feel of yesterday's noir, and Nagy captures it perfectly-with her trademark style and wit-the trendy Manhattan hotels, the cell phones, the New Age snake oil, and the ever-widening gulf between form and content that is life at the turn of the twenty-first century.