Beach Road

Beach Road is a thriller by the American writer James Patterson, published in 2006. It is set on the eastern end of Long Island, in a resort area where people who own the summer houses and the people who work in them live alongside one another all season.

Tom Dunleavy is a Montauk attorney with very little business and a good deal of local knowledge. The triple murder that brings him into court turns the community into the centre of national attention, and his client is a local man whom the summer residents are ready to convict in conversation long before any trial begins.

Dunleavy takes on the case knowing that his client's position is precarious and that the pressure on everyone involved is being applied by people with money. He is joined by Kate Costello, an attorney he was once involved with and who has the connections he lacks, and the two of them try to work out what happened on a night when the accounts they are given do not fit together. The novel is a legal thriller as much as a crime story, and much of it concerns what defending a client costs the lawyer who does it.