PRECIOUS FRIENDS

In Spinelli’s thriller, a man contends with cancer, a husband with an appetite for younger men, the social gauntlet of a Hamptons summer…and murder.

Joseph Byron “JB” Pulaski, a 48-year-old sociology professor, has spent 17 years building a life in Sag Harbor with his husband, Mike, and their adopted son, Emilio. Mike has trouble with fidelity. The story opens on a summer luau at their home, with Mike already grinding against the latest in a long series of stray young men with practiced casualness while JB watches from the perimeter, cataloguing the Hamptons social theater with the cold eye of a man who’s learned to treat humiliation as data. Into this fraught milieu enters Gianni Cuomo, a pianist whose amber eyes miss nothing and reveal even less—he’s a new kind of trouble, a different species from Mike’s usual conquests. As the season accumulates its disasters—social, marital, and, eventually, criminal, with a murder connected to Mike’s infidelities—JB finds himself implicated in something that, even with his considerable intelligence, he can’t simply think his way out of. The author is shrewd in his choice of setting, getting the most out of the collision of old money and new desperation at Hamptons dinner parties, the McMansions in Bridgehampton, and the farmstand tomato prices debated with genuine moral urgency (“cultural lubricants intertwined as naturally as Montauk oysters and mignonette”). Spinelli renders this world with affectionate contempt, and JB is the perfect narrator—erudite, self-lacerating, and possessed of a dark humor that functions as both shield and weapon. The mystery mechanics are secondary to the character study, which is where the novel’s real ambitions lie. The middle section loses some momentum as the murder investigation idles and the ensemble’s interpersonal dramas unfold. The final act recovers the urgency, but readers may lament the distance traveled to get there. Still, JB’s voice is compelling enough to sustain the journey.

A sharp, strange, well-observed murder mystery.