The Weekenders

The Weekenders is Mary Kay Andrews’s 2016 novel, set on the fictional Belle Isle off the coast of North Carolina and built around the kind of family secrets and community dynamics that her contemporary southern fiction handles well. The protagonist is Riley Griggs, a wealthy Atlanta woman who has come to her family’s Belle Isle vacation home for what she believes will be the start of summer with her husband and teenage daughter. When she arrives, her husband does not show up. The family business is in trouble. And Riley quickly discovers that the wealthy comfortable life she had been living was considerably less stable than she had been allowed to believe.

The Belle Isle community where Riley has spent her summers since childhood becomes the setting for the slowly developing crisis that drives the rest of the novel. The wealthy weekenders of the title, the seasonal residents who own the various beach houses and second homes that make up the island’s high end real estate, have their own ongoing dynamics that Riley’s situation pulls into. Old friendships, old rivalries, and old romantic complications from her teenage years on the island all come back to the surface as Riley tries to figure out what has actually happened to her family and how to deal with it.

Mary Kay Andrews handles the situation with her characteristic warmth and humor. Even as Riley’s situation becomes genuinely difficult, the novel is funny in the way Andrews’s fiction reliably is, with the supporting cast of Belle Isle residents providing the comic energy that keeps the novel moving alongside the more serious central plot. The southern coastal setting is rendered with affection and specific detail, the southern social codes are handled with knowing precision, and the wider mystery involving the missing husband slowly clarifies across the page count.

What distinguishes Mary Kay Andrews from a lot of writers in her general territory is the affection she feels for the southern coastal settings she works in. Belle Isle is a fictional creation but is recognizably modeled on the actual barrier islands of the North Carolina and Georgia coasts, and the community Andrews builds at the heart of the novel feels like a real place where people have been spending their summers for generations.

For longtime Mary Kay Andrews fans, The Weekenders is one of the stronger late entries in her catalogue. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style. Readers who enjoy Karen White, Patti Callahan, Adriana Trigiani, or Dorothea Benton Frank will find familiar pleasure here. The combination of mystery and contemporary romance gives the novel additional weight beyond just the central romance plot.