In David McConnell's The Beads, members of a wealthy New York family begin to unravel after having wasted their incredible fortune over more than a century. The patriarch gets lost in a maze of his own neuroses. The mother luxuriates in a life of idle pleasure. The neglected son, Darius, nurses an obsession with his ultra-normal best friend, Barry. As if that weren't enough, a teacher whom the boys share obliviously commits a shocking crime.

Years later, Darius has traded responsibility for an escape to Europe, where he gets a much-needed lesson in decency from a kind German aristocrat. Meanwhile, Barry stumbles into a father/son relationship with a philandering lawyer who may actually be his biological father.

Once shielded from the real world by privilege, McConnell's fragile characters tally what they owe others and what they dream they're owed themselves as time passes indifferently for everyone, beat by beat like the telling of a rosary. Set against a backdrop of late nineties' Manhattan, The Beads boldly pierces the armor of old money and tries to locate love, if it even exists amid the tangled affectations of a great city.