Dear Readers,
I’m heading to the beach this weekend, and I already know what’s going in my beach bag: Palm Beach Confidential, Susannah Marren’s latest Palm Beach novel.
At first glance, it has everything I want in a beach read: glamorous settings, characters in conflict, a secret romance and a powerful family with far too much to lose. At the center is Lucinda Barrows, a woman who has spent decades building a dazzling Palm Beach life over the remains of the one she left behind in Kesgrave, a small town in the Florida Panhandle. Her three adult daughters are each unraveling in their own way: Maribelle is estranged from Raleigh after Raleigh’s affair with Maribelle’s late husband; Caroline is trying to hold both the family business and the family itself together; and Raleigh is fighting for custody of her young son while being pulled into a risky new romance.
Then mysterious letters begin arriving, and Lucinda’s carefully constructed image starts to unravel. What follows is part family drama, part slow-burn mystery and part social x-ray of a world where image is everything, and everyone is watching.
But Palm Beach Confidential is more than just a juicy read with lots of drama. Before Susan Shapiro Barash began writing novels as Susannah Marren, she had already spent years exploring the private lives of women in her nonfiction — marriage and divorce, infidelity, female rivalry, toxic friendships, mother-daughter bonds, sisterhood and the secrets women keep. Those same interests run through her Palm Beach novels, where polished surfaces conceal complicated private lives.
That’s what makes this such a satisfying pick for a long afternoon by the water. It has the pleasures of a page-turner, but with the emotional undertow of a novel about the lives women construct in public, the truths they manage in private, and the sacrifices they make to survive. It’s also what makes Palm Beach Confidential our Hidden Gem of the Week.
Happy Reading!
Meryl Moss, Publisher, BookTrib
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