Excerpt from A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter One

It was the summer of 1986 when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There was a matchbook in her pocket from Flanagan's, the preppy hangout on Eighty-Fourth Street. Police learned she'd left the bar with him at four a.m. Unbelievably handsome guy, charismatic, popular Flanagan's mainstay. By nightfall, they had him under arrest. She'd coaxed him into going to the park to have sex, he told the police. Her death had been a terrible accident.

PREPPY SEXCAPADE TURNS DEADLY! screamed the cover of the New York Post.

Of course it had been an accident. Horrible, unthinkable, but an accident. "I liked her very much," he'd tell police. "She was easy to get along with. Easy to talk to." Why would a guy like him suddenly decide to kill a girl he liked? It made no sense.

Everyone had known him forever. Buckley, Surf Club, Gold & Silver committee. Remember that time he went down Ajax Mountain on one ski? That epic backgammon game in Palm Beach?

And her? Nice enough, the Flanagan's regulars said, if a little annoying. She'd been after him all summer. That night, she'd hung around Flanagan's until closing time, trying to get his attention. Kept going to the bathroom so she could parade by his table in the back where he sat drinking whiskey and playing cards. Outwaited all the other girls—Campbell Hughes, Minnie Potter, Brooke Limbocker. Waylaid him at the door and said, "Wherever you're going, I'm going too."

An hour later, she was dead.

Not that it was her fault. But that didn't make it his.

"She forced my pants down," he'd tell police, "without my consent," straddled him, squeezed his balls—made it hurt. He'd yelled for her to stop, yanked her off him. She landed at the base of the tree and didn't move. He thought she was kidding, but she was dead.

ROUGH SEX GONE WRONG! said the Daily News.

A freak accident, everyone decided. She hadn't known when to quit.

"She was a very nice person," he'd say. "She was just too pushy."

But that wouldn't be until August. It was still early June, and a different girl was on the cover of all the city tabloids, a young, beautiful model with an ugly gash down her cheek. A pair of lowlifes with razor blades had slashed her face outside a West Side bar the night before, hired by the girl's landlord after she turned down his repeated advances.

BEAUTY AND THE CREEP, the cover of the Post proclaimed.

Nina Jacobs bent over the doorman's console to study the photos, wincing at the girl's 150 black stitches. The model was twenty-four, six years older than Nina, but she looked years younger—round cheeks, angelic smile despite the gruesome attack. She was from Wisconsin. Nina pictured apple orchards and open country roads, log rafts drifting down the river, picnics on its banks with your neighbors. No wonder she looked so good-natured and gracious, even with the Frankenstein stitches. No wonder she'd felt safe meeting the landlord at a bar to get back her security deposit, despite the beard on him that looked like a layer of dirt. Nina wouldn't have met that beard in Grand Central Station during rush hour. You knew better when you grew up in the city.

She glanced at herself in the lobby mirror. She was headed out to Flanagan's to celebrate graduation with her Bancroft friends and, while she was at it, scout a candidate to please God take her virginity this summer before her apparatus rusted shut. She'd aimed for the opposite of her usual plain-Jane look: moussed-up hair and thick, dark eyeliner, Spandex skirt, and a satin camisole under a denim jacket. But now, with the model's wholesomeness in mind, it seemed she'd swung too far in the other direction. "Smile," she ordered her reflection. "This isn't a lineup." She rubbed off half the eyeliner and pushed down her hair.

Excerpted from A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner. Copyright © 2025 by Cynthia Weiner. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.