"ELECTRIFYING--A TREASURED WRITER WORKING AT THE HEIGHT OF HER
POWERS." --Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
A haunting and emotionally fraught story of a woman dealing with the
ripple effects of her husband's financial fraud--and with what she knew,
or pretended not to know, about it
After her husband Alan's massive white-collar crimes are exposed,
Suzanne's wealthy, comfortable life shatters: Alan goes to prison, and
Suzanne files for divorce. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from her ex
at Norfolk State Prison, Suzanne thinks she can cleanse herself of all
connections to her ex-husband and their old life together. Instead, she
decamps to a Massachusetts beach town where she creates a new life and
identity.
Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he has
ruined demand restitution. At the same time, awestruck and obsessed by
the spectacle of a major whale stranding on a beach near her home,
Suzanne makes an apparently high-minded decision that in turn
reverberates not only through Alan's life as he tries to rebuild but
also through the lives of their son, Alan's new wife, his estranged
mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.
A resonant and bitingly perceptive story about the people next to the
bad guys--the queasy and ambiguous territory people like Suzanne inhabit
as they stand by, and the ways in which they try to thread the needle of
their culpability--The Complicities is a searing look at moral
responsibility, and about who, in the end, pays for a crime.
