The Gold Coast was published by Nelson DeMille in 1990.  It was nearly 18 years before he would feel the need to do more with the characters he created in that novel.  I don’t know what the motivation was, but reading between the lines it almost seems like it had to do with the events of 9/11 and bringing the characters “home”.

In The Gold Coast, readers met the Sutter family, high-society blue-bloods living in an area of Long Island’s north shore in Nassau County known as “The Gold Coast.”  Here were the mansions of the ultra-rich and the one-percenters. The area was in decline at the time of that novel, with the mansions and their acreage being sold off to developers.  Events in that novel blew the family apart and led patriarch John Sutter to leave his native Long Island to sail around the world.

The Gate House picks up sometime after those events.  It’s stated that it’s ten years later, but that really doesn’t make sense.  It’s now after 9/11 and the first novel was released in 1990.  It might be a minor nitpick but it’s one that bothered me right from the start, and there was plenty that bothered me about this book.

John Sutter returns to his native Long Island from London for the anticipated funeral of the woman who resided in the gatehouse of the novel’s title.  While there he must reconcile himself with the demons of his past.  He’s carved out a bit of a life for himself in London after his three-year cathartic sail around the world, but it’s never really been “home”. Almost as soon as he’s back amongst the area of his younger days, he falls into a level of comfort that he doesn’t have anywhere else.

That doesn’t stop him from trying to shag everything that moves, and while he has designs on the divorced daughter of the dying woman, it’s his ex-wife Susan who is the real magnet for him.  At the end of The Gold Coast Susan had murdered her married lover, and although John alluded to the fact that he still had feelings for her, they divorced.  Almost as soon as they see each other in The Gate House, they reconcile and plan to get remarried.  Most of the book is about them working through their issues from the events in the previous novel over a period of a few days.  Not only do they contend with the fractured relationship, but pressures from external forces including Susan’s ultra-rich father, who threatens to cut off his daughter and grand-children should she and John get remarried, as well as the son of the man Susan killed who’s not about to let his father’s killer walk around unpunished.

Sounds like a good novel, but it’s not as good as it could have been.  Every detail of the days that go by seems to be enumerated here, causing the book to plod along.  There were so many times I wanted to just give up because I was tired of details about what they ate, where they shopped, how many times they had sex, etc.  It seems to take forever to get to anything really meaty in the book. While some of the characters are interesting and fun, the book could have used a much heavier hand from the editor.

Told in the first person from John’s perspective, his witty and sarcastic observations are a lot of fun.  Even then, though, it feels like it’s lacking in depth to really feel like I knew the characters.  John loves his ex-wife, but the question is why.  Here is a woman who betrayed her husband with someone he considered a friend.  Yes, the sex is great and her having so much money helps (although when push comes to shove he proves that isn’t what their relationship is about), but Susan is so out of touch with reality that she doesn’t see the threat practically right next door to them nor get the implications of her father not giving her a $250k a year “allowance” will mean to the life to which she has become accustomed.  She thinks nothing of dropping the money to buy her soon-to-be husband again a sailboat all while her father cutting her off is hanging over their heads.  She is a child in many ways, except in the bedroom.

Somehow their two children have matured, but I didn’t have the sense of a great relationship in the family. Most of the time I felt like The Gate House didn’t know what it wanted to be.  The action really doesn’t start until the last part of the book, a good 3/4 of the way through it.  The rest of it is going over the same points again and again with entirely too much detail.  The characters don’t seem familiar even though I’d seen them in the previous novel that I’d just finished a short time before.  This is a sequel that can be skipped, and you won’t be missing much of anything.

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