The Lizards of Palm Beach
Owl Canyon Press
“Fast paced and elegantly plotted, shrewdly observant, The Lizards of Palm Beach is a novel for our time, a tale of decadence, sordid glamour and ambition run amok. Bruce McDougall has written a skewering portrait of the idle rich at play, casting a gimlet eye on their affectations, illusions and most of all their appetites—for money, for art, for prestige and a higher perch on the social ladder. Wise, literate and achingly funny, McDougall wields his comic pen with the precision of a surgeon. I couldn’t stop reading.”
Andrea Barnet, author of All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930
A gifted but naïve sculptor from Canada settles in Lake Worth, a neighborhood near Palm Beach, attracted by the palm trees and content to sell his work at a nearby flea market. He’s joined by his brother, who is attracted to Palm Beach by the money. The brother sells three of the sculptor’s pieces through a local art dealer, who creates a market for the work among his wealthy clientele at absurdly inflated prices. When a claim is filed after one of the pieces is stolen, the insurance company’s investigation threatens to expose the dealer’s questionable tactics and his clients’ gullibility. The artist resists temptation and maintains the integrity of his work. He also refuses to create sculptures to order, even if they might fetch far more money than he receives for the pieces he creates for himself. But in an insular world of sordid corruption, where contacts matter more than friendship, money buys acquiescence to corruption, and everything and everyone has a price, he questions the value of his integrity and wonders if he hasn’t deluded himself into thinking that there are more important things in life than money.