num_pages: 290
description: 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 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.
language: English
title: The Beauty
titlecomplete: The Beauty
ratings_count: 3
publisher: The Overlook Press