Set among the fabulously wealthy Palm Beach residents, Mary Adkins’ novel follows a young couple who, with their toddler, Bash, leave Queens when Mickey takes a job working as a house manager for a wealthy acquaintance. Soon he’s lured away by an even wealthier neighbor, Cecil Stone, at twice the salary.

Mickey had been a rising Broadway star until an operation damaged his vocal cords --- though he still dreams of returning to the stage. Rebecca, a journalist who writes a column on income inequality for New York magazine, objects to this at first. But the money is too good, and when she gets recruited by Cecil’s wife, Astrid, to ghostwrite her memoir, she begins to engage with the very people she had been busily judging.

"What saves PALM BEACH, and Rebecca, from being insufferable is an unexpected storyline that evolves into an intriguing debate about what really matters --- and what price you would pay to get it."

Then a medical crisis hits, and the Stones come to Rebecca and Mickey’s rescue, bringing in experts and paying their exorbitant bills. As they become more dependent on the Stones, Rebecca has to reckon with the tensions between her self-righteous disdain for the wealthy, and her dawning appreciation for how money and its consequent comforts can be used. Before long, her own interest in accruing wealth is piqued --- with potentially disastrous consequences.

There are several colorful characters here, including the Stones’ chef, Paul, and Cecil’s ne’er-do-well brother, Bruce. But Mickey and Rebecca feel isolated, both because they don’t belong to the milieu in which they find themselves, and because parenthood has separated them from many of their old friends. Readers may also find that they have an equal amount of ambivalence towards Rebecca as she has towards her new employers. Not only is she judgmental about the wealthy men and women whom she meets through the Stones, she is also rigid about her own virtue.

Determined not to leave her child with a sitter for even a few hours, Rebecca has Mickey look after their son while working so that she can meet with Astrid --- even after Astrid has asked the kindly housekeeper to look after him in the room next door. When she calls her mother after a silence of four months, she is barely affected by the news that their farm just went into foreclosure. The reason they had stopped talking was that she disapproved of their raising cattle --- she’s a vegan --- and hadn’t sent them so much as a picture of their grandchild in the ensuing months.

What saves PALM BEACH, and Rebecca, from being insufferable is an unexpected storyline that evolves into an intriguing debate about what really matters --- and what price you would pay to get it.