You can't go wrong with a Chris Bohjalian novel. I have read all but two of them and liked every one, loved most. His latest, THE AMATEUR, is no exception, although it is one of the few that I didn't love.

I have found over the years that better writers do not resort to an abundance of sex or the F word. So at first this novel turned me off. It was full of sex and the F word, so unlike Bohjalian. But I understand now his intention: he was establishing the character of the story's narrator.

THE AMATEUR is written as if this is Mira's memoir. As a teenager she was a golf prodigy and often golfed with a team of grown men (and was the highest scorer). In her memoir, she establishes right away that she was not a good girl; she was attracted to much older men, had sex with them since she was 15 years old, did lots of drugs, and used the F word in many of her sentences.

Mira is now an established and widely read author of novels. (And it sounds like Bohjalian is giving her credit for some of his own novels, although I'd like to know more about a novel he mentions called MORAL COMPASS.) Now that she is in her 60s, she says, she is finally ready to write a memoir and admit to two things she has felt guilty about her whole life: she killed a caddy and she broke up a family (her words).

In 1978 Mira was 18. She was at her family's country club one day putting golf balls into a net. A 17-year-old caddy just happened to be walking in front of the net when one of her golf balls sailed right through it, hitting him in the head and killing him. Although, of course, this was not Mira's fault, she felt like she killed him for the rest of her life. For a while there, so did the police and the DA.

Plus, Mira's attraction to older men got her in some trouble. But it actually wasn't as bad as it might've been if her parents and the law were aware that her current affair had been going on since she was 15 years old. What made her feel bad, though, was that a wife and two children lost a husband and father as a result. Mira continued finding older but unmarried men to sleep with.

Read this for the criminal trial and the surprise ending.