An ambitious family's rise and fall plays out in a small town on the Maine coast. This debut novel opens with what will also be its last scene: a fancy lawn party and lobster bake on the waterfront property of the Thatch family, prominent in the little town of Damariscotta. A celebration of the Amherst College women's lacrosse team, of which Allie Thatch is a member, it's a nice party until local English teacher and lacrosse coach Andrew goes poking around in the house and notices some photos of a burned car with two bodies in it--and then the police show up. The book's narrator, Andrew was raised in Damariscotta, went away for college and jobs, but has moved his young family back. Andrew sometimes narrates in first person, although much of the story is framed as interviews he does after the day of the party for a book he's writing. He's known Ed Thatch since they were teenagers, when Andrew worked for the Lobster Pound, owned by Ed's father, and Ed treated him like a greenhorn. Ed's life changed when he met Stephanie LeClair. Although, as one character says, "they don't come from much," Steph wants nice things and Ed wants her to have them. Circling between past and present, the book recounts how they get them. While he's fishing for lobsters, Ed starts burglarizing the posh summer homes along the shore during the off season. From there, it's a quick slide into smuggling drugs from above the Canadian border. Meanwhile, Steph goes to college and becomes the town's manager and unofficial mayor, ironically dubbing it "Maine's Safe Haven." Their son, EJ, becomes a cop, mainly so he can protect his family's criminal enterprises. It looks like Allie might just make a step up socially and out of Damariscotta altogether after she gets a lacrosse scholarship. But then that party happens. White handles suspense and a complex plot well, but the characters don't quite come into focus--it's never clear why Ed and Steph find each other so compelling, and Allie, who serves as a motivation for many of her family's actions, is a blank herself until very late in the book. A small-town riff on The Great Gatsby suffers from underdeveloped characters. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

When living in Boston becomes too expensive for the young couple to manage, protagonist Andrew, along with his wife, Maeve, and their two young children, moves to his small hometown, Damariscotta, on the midcoast of Maine. There Andrew encounters Ed Thatch, whom he knew when they were teenagers and, later, when Ed was a poor lobsterman. Now, to Andrew's surprise, the man has become a mini-mogul, and his wife, Steph, is the town's mayor. How to account for this good fortune? Steph puts it down to hard work, but readers soon discover it's rooted in Ed's many youthful thefts from coastal mansions. Soon, however, Ed finds an even more lucrative endeavor: drug running. When this is finally discovered by the authorities, Andrew decides to write a book about it--presumably this one. White's first novel is a corker, well plotted and paced and with just the right elements of suspense. That the novel moves backward and forward in time from various points of view is occasionally a bit confusing but doesn't distract from the story with its vivid setting and well-realized characters. A fine debut.

DEBUT In this sometimes-noir tale of small-town social climbing, Andy moves back to his hometown with his family after years away and finds Damariscotta, ME, both unchanged and much changed. Lobsterman Ed Thatch, son of the owner of the town's lobster pound and whom Andy worked with one summer, is now the town's richest man and married to Steph, a non-Mainer, who is now the town manager bent on "improving" the working-class community. Ed has his own civic projects, such as donating the funding for a town athletic field. Though the Thatches sell themselves as an American success story, Ed seems to have resources well beyond those of a lobsterman, and some locals have suspicions. Andy, an English teacher, does his own investigation through writing a book on the Thatches. The suspicions come to a head when two men associated with the drug trade are found dead, and EJ (the Thatches' son, a Damariscotta police officer) vanishes, only to turn up dead in Ohio. VERDICT Worlds collide in this personal tragedy fueled by perceptions of class difference as a man is destroyed by his love for a woman he perceives as "above" him socially and his desire to give her everything in order not to lose her.--Lawrence Rungren

A man returns to his small Maine hometown and unravels the dark truth behind its wealthiest family in White's alluring debut. As a teenager, Andrew worked summers as a dockhand with lobsterman Ed Thatch while dreaming of escaping for school and a new life. But after settling with his wife and two young children in Boston, Andrew decides to move back, thinking it would be cheaper for the family on his teacher and lacrosse coach's salary. Now, while attending an elaborate reception for the Amherst College lacrosse team at the Thatch home (Ed's daughter is on the team), he can't reconcile the new Ed--the town's wealthy benefactor and owner of several lobster boats--with the humble Ed he knew on the docks. During the party, Andrew finds a folder with photos of a burned-out car and two dead bodies. Stunned, he goes outside, where police cars speed up the driveway. White keeps the nonlinear story on a low boil, gradually hinting at Andrew's motivation for investigating Ed and the details of his findings, which point to a hidden world of larceny and drug trafficking. An intriguing portrait emerges of the Thatches, as Ed's wife wishes he would get out of the criminal enterprise, which Ed built to give Steph "the life she deserves," and their slippery slope ends at a violent conclusion. Readers will be hooked. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)