Excerpt from The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You can beat this asshole, right?" she said.

So there had been no other way out. He had stood up and the whole room had broken into a buzz. They had loaded into their cars (the Brit lady on the back of the Indian, it turned out), and because there was no way to get into the Casino now, had driven out to the high school, where there were lighted courts, but of course it was two in the morning and the lights were on a timer so they had to maneuver some of the cars alongside until their headlights lit the courts. Half a dozen racquets came out of various trunks. Someone popped a new can of balls.

And what could he say? He had destroyed the guy. There was a big difference between a drunk forty-year-old former Division III player and a drunk thirty-one-year-old international touring pro even if the international touring pro was playing left-handed in his stocking feet and lacked the killer instinct, you tuxedoed douche-bag. The guy had a big first serve that was a bitch returning left-handed, but it became clear after the first couple of games that everything else he had was strictly 4.5. And once the freaky nerves were gone, Sandy had started totally messing with the guy, moving him back and forth along the baseline and then drop-shotting him, moon-balling him just for fun, spinning the ball, cutting it, slicing it like a Harlem Globetrotter. He even pulled out this hilarious serve he'd learned from Jimmy Arias. He'd toss the ball up and swing at it like he normally would do, only he'd miss it—a total whiff!—and then all in the same motion, just when the ball was about to touch the ground, underhand it right into the service box. Only he had to do this right-handed, but by then nobody cared, not even the bozo douche-bag who Sandy had to admit had carried the whole thing off better than he would have expected. When it was over, they met at the net. The guy was holding out the key to the Indian, telling him something about how it had a suicide shifter so he'd have to watch out. The Brit lady was saying she'd always hated the bloody thing anyway.

"Forget it," Sandy had said. "You're drunk. I'm drunk. Everybody's drunk. Forget it."

But as soon as he'd said it he knew it was the wrong thing. Margo took the key and threw it into his chest, gave him a look like don't be a loser. (Cripes, he said to Aisha—he said things like that: cripes, geez, smart aleck—it was part of being a Southern Gentleman—cripes, it was like he couldn't get anything right that night!) He'd at least had the good sense to wait until people were out of earshot before he admitted he didn't know how to ride a motorcycle. Margo had rolled her eyes, held out her hand for the key, and Sandy had followed her home in her SUV with the thin, intense-looking girl sitting silently beside him in the passenger seat.

And that's how he'd met Margo. That's how it'd all started, if "all" was a word he could use for an affair that was more off than it was on. Or rather, an affair that was only on when Margo said it was-a phone call, a meeting place, and then nothing for days. Or months, as it turned out once he'd left Newport that past September. Not a text or a phone call or an e-mail the whole winter while he was down south at Saddlebrook.

Excerpted from The Maze at Windermere by Gregory Blake Smith. Copyright © 2018 by Gregory Blake Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.