TLC Book Tour: It Happens In the Hamptons

The cover of this book alone makes me want to go to the pool or beach.  And once I started reading, I quickly became immersed in the goings-on in the Hamptons by those who have it all, and those who work for those who have it all.

Synopsis taken from Amazon:

When Katie Doyle moves across the country to the Hamptons, she is hoping for summer employment, new friends for her young son, and a chance to explore a new love affair with a dazzling investor. What she finds is a strange cocktail of classes, where society’s one-percenters vacation alongside local, hard-working people who’ve lived in the Hamptons for generations. Though she’s looking forward to their move, Katie is wary about mingling with her boyfriends’ East Coast elite circles. She soon discovers Southampton isn’t all that it seems to be on the surface—and neither are the people who live there.

As George takes Katie on a whirlwind tour of country clubs, haute couture, and lavish events, she is amazed to witness sudden whims become dire needs, extra-marital affairs blossoming right and left, and people purchase friends and loyalties like a pair of shoes. Even the middle-class townspeople maintain a determined façade while maneuvering like sharks among the wealthy summer invaders.

The more Katie becomes immersed, the more she learns the secrets of both the upstairs and downstairs, the upper crust and middle of the road. The combustion between the classes becomes explosive as the summer tears on. Betrayals, a sexual predator, and a missing person lost in murky waves drive the reader on a racing Learjet ride through impossible twists and turns until landing at the shocking conclusion. When she meets Luke, a local surfer and middle school teacher, he makes her question what it is she really wants as she understands the life she’s begun for herself is built on shifting Hamptons’ dunes.

My Thoughts:

Katie and her son may be the intended focus of this novel, but their story is not the only one being told.  The two have relocated from the Pacific Northwest to the Hamptons, living in the cottage that her sort-of boyfriend, George, has given them access to.

Katie isn't sure she wants to date George, and becomes interested in Luke , who isn't part of the same social elite that George is.  Although Katie sees George as gentleman, readers get another picture of him which doesn't paint him in such a favorable light.

I love books about the wealthy and the dysfunction in their lives, and It Happens in the Hamptons certainly does paint a picture of people who have it all, yet have nothing that really matters.

This would be a perfect book to throw in your beach bag or bring along on vacation.  

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for providing a copy of this book for my review.  All opinions expressed are, as always, my own.

Visit the HarperCollins website for more information.