The Jersey Shore, winter, 1969-70. Land development has the economy booming and the local political scene awash in cash, while sensational headlines in the big city newspapers expose the grip of organized crime on government and politics in New Jersey. Reporter Eddie Bonneville, an ambitious but unworldly youth, records an explosive interview with Matty ‘The Mule’ Esposito, the Shore rackets boss. Outraged at being stabbed in the back by politicians he’s dealt with for decades, the aged gangster defiantly opens up about his 40 year reign over the Jersey Shore underworld. Esposito’s allegations open Eddie’s eyes to a world of political corruption. He believes he’s onto a story that will make his career. But his investigation thrusts him into a life and death battle with the corrupt and criminal forces he has unwisely antagonized. A portrait of small town America losing its innocence, set in the charged and painful space between generations, Eddie’s story captures a young reporter’s personal and professional coming of age. Winter in a Summer Town is the journey of a troubled kid learning hard lessons about power, politics, and love, in a world that’s trying to turn him into the kind of man he refuses to become.

Eddie Bonneville, the protagonist in Gene Ritchings’ new novel, “Winter in a Summer Town,” is an authentic, vivid depiction of a modern journalist…Only a journalist who has survived years of the field’s unkindest cuts could create a character like Bonneville, whose innocence is peeled away in aching layers as he navigates what he believes will be the story that makes his career… Ritchings has written a novel in which the story of a young man’s personal and professional coming of age is a mirror of its times, an oracle of its country’s future and a vivid tableau of our present.

_The Toledo Free Press