51 pages • 1-hour read
The Summer Guests
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Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, graphic violence, and death.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Purity, Maine, 1972”
The Summer Guests opens in July 1972. Officer Randy Pelletier is eating breakfast at the Marigold Café in Purity, Maine, a small vacation town on the coast. He reads the newspaper and notes the number of vacationers who have been charged with minor infractions like public drunkenness, which is typical for the time of year. Just then, two out-of-towners come in wearing leather jackets. Randy thinks they look suspicious, but before he can approach them, a truck driven by a local man named Sam Tarkin crashes into several pedestrians on Main Street. Randy goes to assist, approaching Sam, who reaches for Randy’s gun and shoots him.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Maggie”
50 years later, a group of retired CIA agents who live in Purity, Maine, gather. These former agents—Maggie Bird, Declan Rose, Ben Diamond, and Ingrid Slocum—call themselves the Martini Club, and they are at Maggie’s house for their monthly book club meeting. Maggie is a devoted birder, and she has selected that month’s book, The Genius of Birds. As they sit outside, Callie, a 14-year-old girl who lives next door, waves at the group while walking her goats and cow to the barn. They wave back.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Susan”
Susan Conover is driving with her 15-year-old daughter, Zoe, her husband of two years, Ethan Conover, and Ethan’s mother, Elizabeth, to the Conovers’ summer home in Purity. The family is gathering there for a memorial service for George Conover, Ethan’s father, who died three months earlier. The summer “cottage,” called Moonview, is on the edge of Maiden Pond, so called because a girl drowned there a century ago. Zoe is a confident swimmer and eager to swim in the pond.
Susan, Ethan, Zoe, and Elizabeth arrive at the cottage. Ethan’s older, wealthier brother, Colin Conover, his wife, Brooke, and their quiet, 19-year-old son, Kit, are already there. Zoe goes for a swim, and Ethan and Susan watch her. They hope that Ethan will make progress on his long overdue second novel while they are there.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Reuben”
Reuben Tarkin, son of Sam Tarkin, lives across the pond from Moonview. He notices that the Conovers have arrived for the summer. He has also noticed that their neighbors, wealthy octogenarian bachelor Arthur Fox and middle-aged Hanna Greene, have also arrived. The Conovers, Arthur, and Hannah are not friendly to Reuben, a working-class local; only the Conovers’ nanny, Anna, was ever kind to him. He sees Zoe swimming in the pond and realizes she must be Ethan’s stepdaughter. Reuben pauses before returning home to take care of his sister, Abigail, who has a disability.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Susan”
The next morning, Susan goes downstairs to find Ethan writing and Zoe in the pond playing with a local girl. Susan decides to spend the day shopping in the nearby town of Bar Harbor with Hannah Greene, the neighbor. Hannah tells Susan stories about Colin and Ethan, whom she used to babysit. Hannah recounts that Colin and Ethan’s parents, her parents, her father’s secretary, and Arthur would meet for drinks every night.
Susan returns home at 4:00 pm to find Ethan still working. Zoe still has not returned home, and Ethan says Zoe went to see the neighboring girl’s cow. However, when Zoe does not return home by dinnertime, Susan begins to worry. After nightfall, Ethan goes out to look for Zoe, and Susan calls the police.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Jo”
Acting police chief Jo Thibodeau does her rounds in Purity. She likes to keep an eye on things. She drives over to Maiden Pond, the scene of several apparent robberies: “[S]ome of the seasonal cottages had recently been broken into” (38). She notices an unfamiliar car with a male driver and female passenger turn around behind her, and she notes their license plate number. Then, her phone rings.
Chapter 7 Summary
Jo gets the report of the missing teenager, Zoe, and goes to Moonview cottage. She was there once before, when George Conover claimed his canoe had been sabotaged by Reuben Tarkin.
Now, Jo speaks with the Conover family, who tell her that Zoe spent her day with a neighbor girl. She was last seen wearing a red and pink dress. Ethan says he was out of the house from noon until 2:00 pm buying lunch and more paper, Colin says he was out all day on a hike, and Brooke says she and Kit were in town for most of the day, though they stopped off at home around 2:30 pm for Brooke to change her shoes. Zoe has not called or texted, and her phone cannot be located on Find My iPhone. Susan insists Zoe does not hide things from her. When Susan says Zoe went to look at the girl’s cow, Jo realizes the girl they’re referencing must be Callie Yount.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Maggie”
Maggie is awoken at 12:07 am: Luther Yount, Callie Yount’s grandfather and Maggie’s neighbor, is at her door. Luther tells Maggie that he thinks he is in trouble, explaining that Zoe went missing after spending the afternoon with Callie. Luther also tells Maggie he dropped Zoe off at the Maiden Pond boat ramp near Moonview around noon. He then drove to Augusta, Maine, to run errands before returning home around 7:00 pm. When Jo questioned him that evening, Luther told her all this and turned over his truck to be forensically searched. The police are suspicious of Luther because he was the last person to see Zoe alive, but Luther insists to Maggie, “I didn’t touch her” (53).
Chapter 9 Summary
The next morning, the Martini Club goes to the Maiden Pond boat ramp to assist in the search for Zoe. Jo has her hands full managing the many volunteers who are there to assist. Although Maggie is friends with Luther and feels certain he is innocent, the other members of the Martini Club remind her to stay suspicious of everyone. They decide to search the area from the boat ramp to Moonview cottage and soon find a Heineken bottle in the underbrush, which they collect in an evidence bag. However, when they arrive at Moonview cottage, Colin and Elizabeth Conover tell them to leave.
Jo then arrives and chastises the Martini Club for getting involved. Maggie gives Jo the bagged Heineken bottle. As they talk, Jo receives a picture of a backpack found on the side of the highway. Susan confirms that the backpack belongs to Zoe. However, Zoe’s cell phone was not found inside. It last pinged near the cottage the day before around noon.
Maggie suspects Zoe has been abducted.
Chapters 1-9 Analysis
The Summer Guests is structured like a typical mystery thriller, although it subverts the genre in some key ways. The novel opens with the murder of Officer Randy Pelletier and several civilians by Sam Tarkin, setting up the expectation that the bulk of the novel will concern an investigation into what drove Sam to this act. However, the narrative quickly pivots to the present day and the disappearance of Zoe Conover. This creates intrigue, an essential element of a mystery, by leaving readers to wonder how Zoe’s disappearance is connected to the historical events 50 years prior.
Like many works in the mystery thriller genre, The Summer Guests uses a shifting limited third-person perspective. Each chapter assumes the point of view of one of the main characters, Maggie, Jo, Susan, and Reuben, with the exception of the first chapter, which unfolds from the point of view of Officer Pelletier. The shifting limited third-person perspective is ideal for a mystery because each character is unaware of what the other characters know, creating intrigue and suspense. For instance, Reuben Tarkin is an early suspect, and his point of view highlights how much he knows about the Conovers, as “he’d watched as they’d expanded and updated the sprawling cottage to accommodate their growing family” (24). However, Maggie and Jo are not aware of how much Reuben knows about the family, nor is Susan herself. This invites readers to view Reuben with suspicion—his covert interest in the family is potentially threatening—while generating tension, as those who might intervene do not know to regard Reuben as a suspect.
In addition to introducing the central mystery, Zoe’s disappearance, the opening chapters introduce the theme of Tensions Between Upper and Lower Classes through both the relationship between Reuben and the Conovers and the relationship between Ethan and Colin Conover. Reuben is lower class: He lives in near poverty and has spent his entire life living year-round on Maiden Pond. He is also resentful and suspicious of the upper-class Conovers and their neighbors, Arthur Fox and Hannah Greene, who swan in during the summer to “masquerade as common folk” (23). The feeling is mutual. When Arthur Fox sees Reuben, he “glare[s] at him with a look that [says]: I’m watching you” (24). Although this feud stems partly from historical events revealed later in the novel, it speaks to broader tensions in towns, like Purity, that bring together working-class locals and wealthy summer tourists. The former often rely on the latter for their livelihood even as the latter ignore or (as proves to be the case in this novel) exploit them.
A different kind of class tension characterizes the relationship between Ethan and Colin. Although Ethan comes from the wealthy Conover family, he feels insecure because of his faltering career and modest income. Ethan is a struggling writer with a position at Boston College, while Susan Conover is a school nurse. They are firmly middle-class. In contrast, Colin works on Wall Street and drives a BMW—symbols of elite status. Ethan voices his sense of alienation from his wealthy family when he tells Susan that he feels “like [he’s] just a summer guest” in the cottage (21). Further complicating the dynamic is a sense that Colin has not truly earned his wealth: Susan refers to Colin and Brooke as “the golden couple […] because of how easily they seemed to glide through life” (17). Ultimately, these class tensions are contributing factors in the crimes that have been and will be committed.
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