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Jean Loftus has lived at Asshe House for more than 40 years. Its tidy contours, the soft colors of the garden, speak to an orderly, gracious life, a supremely English life. But when workmen unearth a skeleton from that garden, the skeletons from Jean's past begin rising, similarly, to the surface. And the life they speak to - a childhood in Revolutionary Russia, chaotic years as a refugee between the two world wars - was neither orderly nor English. Zita Daunsey, Jean's neighbor in this cozy Sussex town, would like to help Jean protect her secrets. But this task is made more difficult with the sudden arrival of a mysterious, aggressively inquisitive Russian student. Whose body has been moldering in the garden? What aging sins is Jean so anxious to conceal? And in trying to help the past stay buried, at what point does Zita become an accomplice to it? A spellbinding story of love, murder, and deception - The Evening Telegraph (UK) FIRST U.S. PUBLICATION… (more)
User reviews
Setting: early 1990s in southern England
Standalone
First Line: "She had made all the arrangements for her own funeral."
Life at Asshe House is gracious. The guests have lovely manners, and the talk is civilized...until workmen digging up the rose garden uncover the
A reviewer called Ironside's storytelling style "delicate but lethal", and it's true. The story is so well-bred and quiet that its complexity isn't fully appreciated until the very end. I really enjoyed The Accomplice and will look for other books by Ironside.
Everything revolves around a Russian/Latvian/ German émigrée, Jean, who seems to have settled in a a perfect, placid, middle-class English matron, now aging, fond of her stepchildren, to whom she expects to leave all she has. She has moved out of her marital home, Asshe House, into an easier to live in bungalow. The first monkey-wrench thrown into this serene setup is that of a Russian student, Xenia, who shares the surname of Jean's mother, and on that basis writes for assistance in coming for a visit to England -- a visit that she hopes will become permanent. Naomi, Jean's always helpful step-daughter-in-law, decides to help Xenia when Jean isn't interested, with completely unlooked for consequences. Next, renovations that Naomi is making to Asshe House reveal the body of a child -- long dead, or buried recently enough to upset the Jean's life?
Jean begins recording the biography of her tumultuous life, an account of her aristocratic family's attempt to cope with revolution and war, before she found sanctuary in England. Paralleling this, her neighbor and lawyer, Zita Daunsey, the other protagonist, the daughter of a Russian émigrée and an English father, struggles with her relationship with her mother, her son who has cerebral palsy, and the ex-husband who abandoned his wife and son. Both as lawyer and friend, she becomes involved events around Jean.
I enjoyed this thoroughly. It's an interweaving of subplots and motives that kept me enthralled until the end, which the reader understands better than the characters -- but how will all end?