The Complicities

Suzanne is a middle-aged woman determined to remake her life after her husband, Alan, is sent to prison for swindling his investment clients out of millions. Armed with the conviction that she was totally uninvolved in Alan’s illegal dealings, she divorces him and starts creating a new life for herself in a small town in Massachusetts. As she builds a nascent massage therapy business in a simple rental property, Alan is released from prison and becomes mired in restitution requirements; and her son, Noah, supports his father and won’t speak to her. When a whale beaches in town, Suzanne gets swept up in the rescue effort, seeing a possibility for her own redemption in the whale and the environmental activism organizations connected to it.

Meanwhile, two other women–Lydia, Alan’s second wife; and Sylvia, Alan’s estranged birth mother–have their own reckonings to make, and the women find their lives intertwined in ways they could never have expected. What each ultimately discovers is that no choice is made, and no action is taken in a vacuum–and that the lies we tell ourselves are just as dangerous as those we tell others. This novel is a compelling, drawn-from-the-headlines examination of guilt, complicity, and regret.