*The Beekman Affair by Eric Clark*
I absolutely loved "The Beekman Affair"! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5/5 stars) This captivating story drew me in from the first page, and I couldn't put it down. Eric Clark's writing is engaging, and the plot twists kept me guessing until the end. A thrilling read that I'd highly recommend.

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This is a fantastic book that is so relevant in today’s world. Clare and Peter have different views on allowing a black family to move into their neighborhood. Peter stands strong despite the entire neighborhood being against it. Tragedy strikes and eventually Peter reconnects with his former new neighbors and we see just how good his intentions are. Plenty of drama, marital issues, and social justice and equal rights chaos, I couldn’t put this book down and I loved the takeaways from it. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Review will be posted on Instagram and Amazon on pub day and links added to NetGalley.

This novel is a captivating read. As Peter attempts to save his marriage through therapy, his reflections on their issues parallel the unsettling changes in his surroundings. The closure of the main employer leaves many in the affluent Beekman neighbourhood facing joblessness and uncertainty.
Beyond its intriguing plot, the narrative delves into themes of attitudes, resistance to change, and dogmatic behaviour. It also highlights the human capacity for empathy and personal growth. Overall, it was a pleasure to read.

Eric Clark’s “The Beekman Affair” begins in the familiar American key of catastrophe – a neighborhood, a fire, the social machinery that whirs into place afterward – but it refuses the easy satisfactions catastrophe stories usually provide. There is no single villain to hiss at, no single moment that “explains everything,” no clean moral architecture that lets the reader step away feeling properly instructed and safely intact. Instead, Clark offers something messier and, at its best, more honest: a long study of how guilt metastasizes, how denial hardens into identity, and how “being a good person” can become a performance that collapses the moment the weather turns.

The Beekman fire, and the death of Jerome and Margaret Robinson’s son Julian, is the coal that never cools. Years later, Peter Davidson, once a steady Portville husband and father, is still picking ash out of his mind. He volunteers for Eaton Advocacy in Cincinnati, a queer rights organization, with the zeal of someone trying to pay off a debt whose terms keep changing. His marriage to Clare strains under the weight of his obsession, not only because she fears for his safety, but because his need is so nakedly inconvenient: it makes a claim on their life that she cannot control. If Peter’s guilt feels like a moral calling, Clare’s resistance feels like a counter-calling – a devotion to order, respectability, and the belief that if you keep your head down, the world will pass you by without noticing your throat.

Clark’s Cincinnati is drawn as a civic organism rather than a postcard: coffee shops, parks, committee rooms, parade routes, the small bureaucratic rituals that make public life possible, and the larger rituals that make public life feel like fate. Eaton Advocacy bustles with a lived-in specificity that keeps it from becoming set dressing for Peter’s spiritual journey. The people there are funny, impatient, earnest, occasionally contradictory, and – crucially – not waiting for Peter to arrive with his newfound righteousness. Moiré, one of Eaton’s organizers, is the novel’s clearest corrective to Peter’s self-mythologizing. Her language about “presence” and “breathing the same air” can sound, in summary, like a slogan. On the page it reads more like a survival practice: a hard-won philosophy that recognizes that visibility is both the point and the peril.

If the book has a quiet secret weapon, it is the decision to braid perspectives. Clark does not trap us in Peter’s anxious interiority, though Peter is often the engine. We spend time in Jerome and Margaret Robinson’s kitchen, where dinner is ritual: music, prayer, a civility that feels both sincere and armor-plated. Margaret’s grief, expressed through a kind of dissociative “visiting” with Julian, is handled without voyeurism. Jerome’s grief is more volatile, and more politically legible. He is a man who has survived racist exclusion and yet, astonishingly and plausibly, drifts into being an agent of someone else’s exclusion. Clark is careful here. Jerome’s turn is not written as a twist designed to shock; it is written as the kind of turn humans make when they decide the only way to stay safe is to stand on the side of the people holding the bat.

The novel’s most electric early scene arrives when Peter, walking near the University of Cincinnati, looks into a café window and sees Jerome – alive, ordinary, reading a newspaper – the past suddenly embodied. Clark stages the moment with the everyday suspense of a life’s worst memory sitting behind glass. Peter debates whether to go in. The debate is less about manners than metaphysics: if he speaks to Jerome, the past becomes present; if he keeps walking, he preserves the illusion that time has done its healing work. When they finally talk, what unfolds is not catharsis but collision. Peter wants redemption as if it were oxygen. Jerome insists the whole question is ridiculous – tragedies happen, the world is cruel, guilt is a kind of narcissism. Yet Clark makes clear that Jerome’s dismissal is not pure wisdom. It is also avoidance, a refusal to grant Peter the one thing Peter believes will let him stop punishing himself.

Peter’s therapy with Anna Dietrich is one of Clark’s riskier gambits. Fictional therapists often exist to translate the book’s themes into tidy clinical language. Anna sometimes has to do that work here, too. But she is not merely a mouthpiece. Her presence captures something distinctly contemporary: the desire to outsource moral clarity. Peter calls her for what he describes as guidance, but what he wants is permission – the kind of professional absolution that would let him frame his impulses as growth rather than compulsion. Anna refuses to decide for him, and Clark is smart enough to let that refusal land as both ethically correct and emotionally infuriating. Therapy, in this novel, is not magic. It is a place where people learn better vocabulary for the knots they keep tightening.

The Pride Parade sequence is where Clark’s book either wins you or loses you. It is not subtle. It is also, for long stretches, brutally effective. Clark writes the approach to violence the way weather gathers – first a drizzle, then a pressure change, then a sky that looks too early like dusk. A festive procession turns block by block into a corridor of American flags, slurs, and thrown objects. Police appear as street-corner sentinels, present but insufficient, a reminder that “order” is often theater until it suddenly isn’t. The violence is staged with a kind of televised clarity: we see the corridor created by tall buildings, the alley that becomes a trap, the way a crowd learns it can do anything once it realizes no one will stop it.

Clare, at home, watches the coverage and channel-surfs in panic, searching for a different angle that might offer a different ending. It is a scene that feels eerily contemporary even without smartphones in play: catastrophe as content; fear as remote control; the desperate hope that another camera might contain another reality. When she recognizes Peter’s red windbreaker on a limp body carried out of an alley, Clark allows the moment its full ugliness. It is not only the fear of losing a spouse; it is the collapse of the belief that your private life can be kept private if you just behave correctly.

And then Clark makes his most consequential moral move: Jerome, entangled in the protester mob, becomes the person who saves Peter from it. The rescue is written with pulp energy – a charging body, a bat, an impact – but it is also the novel’s refusal to let anyone remain neatly categorized. Jerome cannot undo Beekman. He cannot undo the atmosphere he has helped conjure. He can choose one act. That act is not absolution. It is a decision, and Clark treats it as such: costly, incomplete, and still real. In the aftermath, the hospital chapters are among Clark’s most controlled writing. Bodies are reduced to casts, tubes, alarms; philosophy becomes a language nobody has the energy to speak. Clare’s emotional seesaw – rage, terror, relief, guilt – feels earned because the novel has already shown how she has been trained to fear disorder more than injustice, and how that training finally fails her.

If “The Beekman Affair” falters, it is in its occasional urge to underline. Characters sometimes speak in paragraphs that sound less like speech than like position statements. The narrative voice occasionally drifts toward explanation when the scene would carry more weight if allowed to remain uncomfortable and unresolved. Yet Clark’s prose, at its best, is clean and observant, attentive to physical detail – rain pelting sideways, thunder rolling like exhausted machinery, the suffocating intimacy of a room full of machines – and he has an instinct for irony that is not merely clever but structural. Peter’s quest to prove he is not cowardly leads him, again and again, to acts that look like courage from the outside and like compulsion from the inside. Clare’s quest to preserve stability nearly costs her the one thing she most wants to keep.

The epilogue, set two years later, broadens the novel into something like a civic fable, but it does not become weightless. Eaton thrives. Peter and Clare have woven their lives into the organization’s work. Jerome and Margaret are no longer merely the injured party; they have become allies, donors, people whose presence changes what the city thinks is possible. Peter and Clare adopt Lira, a biracial nonbinary teenager, a plot development that could easily have read as a neat bow tied over tragedy. Here it reads more like a test. If the book’s moral argument is that “presence” changes hearts, then Lira is presence made permanent, not a parade-day performance but a daily reckoning. Lira is drawn with warmth and bite – impatient, funny, sincere, very much a teenager – and their existence forces the novel to move from abstract debates about identity to the domestic realities of what it means to protect a child whose identity is politicized before breakfast.

Clark also threads in Graham Greene’s “The Human Factor,” and that intertext matters. Peter wants to see himself as a principled man whose life can be summarized as sacrifice for the right cause. The novel keeps disrupting that story. It suggests – with a firmness that feels earned – that moral vanity is still vanity, even when it wears decent clothes. The book’s most persuasive claim is not that activism saves the soul, but that the soul is often the least interesting thing at stake. What matters is who gets to live safely in public, and who is asked to keep shrinking themselves to make that safety possible for others.

So why does the book feel relevant now? Because it recognizes the machinery beneath headlines rather than chasing any single headline. Here are ten real-world pressures embedded in the novel’s DNA, rendered as story rather than sermon: (1) the normalization of political intimidation at public events; (2) the way “public safety” language is used to sanitize exclusion; (3) the fragility of policing as protection when crowds decide the rules; (4) the cultural habit of treating marginalized people’s visibility as provocation; (5) the speed with which misinformation and rumor turn neighbors into mobs; (6) the emotional toll of living inside never-ending culture wars; (7) the particular precarity of queer and gender-nonconforming youth, including in foster and adoption systems; (8) the weaponization of patriotic symbols to justify harm; (9) the media logic that turns suffering into spectacle and spectatorship into participation; (10) the slow, difficult labor of interracial coalition that is always at risk of collapsing into resentment.

Readers looking for comp-title coordinates will find this novel sitting at the crossroads of domestic realism and civic parable. It shares with “Little Fires Everywhere” an interest in how suburban order curdles into cruelty, and with “Freedom” a willingness to let a marriage absorb the shocks of national argument. Its courtroom-adjacent moral disputation recalls “Small Great Things.” Its insistence on witnessing – on refusing to avert one’s eyes from institutional harm – echoes the pressure of “The Nickel Boys.” Its exploration of private guilt alongside public violence converses with “Between the World and Me” and “The Fire Next Time,” not in form but in its insistence that moral language without lived consequence becomes another kind of lie. Its attention to the stories communities tell themselves about “who belongs” calls to mind “The Vanishing Half.” Its willingness to place sexuality and shame in the same moral frame as race and class invites comparison to “Giovanni’s Room.” Its fascination with memory as a contested civic site feels in dialogue with “How the Word Is Passed.” And, of course, its explicit mirroring of an adult’s compromised decency with Greene’s spy novel makes “The Human Factor” less a reference than a key.

For all that, “The Beekman Affair” is not primarily a political novel. It is a novel about the private emotional economies that make politics possible: the desire to be innocent, the terror of being seen as wrong, the temptation to turn righteousness into an identity rather than an obligation. Clark’s greatest achievement is that he lets his characters be both sympathetic and aggravating. Peter is brave and self-absorbed, Clare is perceptive and blinkered, Jerome is wounded and dangerous. The book does not flatter them. It does not flatter us, either.

My rating: 79/100.

honestly this book was good just with a few take aways. I honestly didn’t know who’s pov i was reading from until i was long into the chapter otherwise this was a great read that kept me at the edge of my seat

A really good read about racism and other serious societal issues, set in a small town-Beekman. It also delves into the disharmony in a marriage-hence the clever title "The Beekman Affair." It was, at times, slightly protracted, but overall worth reading.
Thank-you to the publisher for letting me read.