I’ve written about Lisa Lutz’s novels twice before in this newsletter: The Passenger (2016) during the first year of Talk about books in a post about women on the run and The Swallows (2019) in a post from two years later. As the first post discussed two novels (the other one being Laura Lippman’s Sunburn) I had intended to write about The Accomplice in conjunction with another of Lippman’s books, Dream Girl (2021). As it turned out, however, I found that Dream Girl seemed to pair better with Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), a book I didn’t like well enough to want to write about it on its own. So I wrote about Dream Girl and Yellowface together and held back The Accomplice till now.

An important figure in the novel is someone who, when she was 11 years old, did something very bad. A bookish and intelligent preteen, she fully understood at the time that what she was doing was wrong and even had a dim understanding that the person she was protecting might indeed be as evil as people said. She did not, however, foresee the full repercussions, which were such that, more than 20 years later, at least one person still wanted to kill her in revenge. She had in the meantime received hate letters telling her that she was going to hell.

The two central characters are a pair of inseparably close friends, Luna Grey and Owen Mann. They meet when they’re both students at Markham University, “a small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley” and “a safe haven for lazy stoners who wanted a break from life” (p. 15). It was Luna’s first choice of college and just about Owen’s last. He came from a wealthier background than she did. The setup might sound a bit like Erich Segal’s Love Story except for the fact that Luna and Owen don’t fall in love — at least not in an erotic or romantic sense.

Their names give a clue as to the nature of their relationship. Each first name and each surname consists of four letters. Put them together and they form a square: apparently solid, like building blocks. The appearance is a bit misleading, though. Unlike the surnames, the first names are both disyllables: you might say they trail off, or flex. So perhaps the names indicate that their friendship is based on mutual reinforcement: each of them covers the other’s weak point. It’s also true that Luna’s surname wasn’t always a tidy four letters. She was originally Luna Brown, that surname being her father’s. When her mother reverted to her original name, Luna changed hers too. She was prepared to go that far to hide her past and her identity, but apparently no further.

Luna didn’t want people to know who she was but presumably didn’t feel that she had the right to take active steps to conceal her history. One fellow student, discovering her secret, ridiculed her half-hearted attempt to change her identity. “Luna”, after all, is not that common a name. Her mother’s change of name, being outside Luna’s control, was something she could benefit from with — at least in this respect — a clear conscience.

The novel has a double time-frame, with short chapters alternating between the earlier period (2002–2005) and the later (2019). In each period a woman is killed and Owen is suspected (by some of the other characters, if not necessarily by the police) of being the killer. In March 2004, a fellow-student of Luna’s and Owen’s named Scarlet is found dead at the bottom of a bluff. She had apparently gone “on a drunken late-night hike, wearing a party dress and Converse sneakers” (p. 355). She and Owen had been having sex a few months earlier but he wanted to end the relationship, such as it was, while Scarlet bombarded him with text messages, which he had been ignoring. Scarlet’s mother, to whom Scarlet had been complaining about Owen’s behaviour, knew immediately who must be responsible for her daughter’s death. The investigating detective questioned Owen without arresting him, though the uniformed police who brought him in for questioning made it look as if he had been arrested.

The detective and prosecutors concluded that Scarlet’s death was probably an accident. In any case, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Owen or anybody else. There was no sign of a struggle at the point from which she had fallen, and only earth under her fingernails, no skin or hair. She did not seem to have been sexually assaulted: although her tights had been pulled down, this was explained by her need to pee. As against the hypothesis of accident there were unexplained details: a series of text messages between Owen’s phone and Scarlet’s which had been deleted from his phone but not from hers; the fact that she had been on the hiking trail at night so inadequately dressed; and an anonymous 911 call the following day, telling the emergency services where her body was to be found.

Owen’s non-arrest had a lasting effect on his life. With the exception of Luna and two other friends, the other students at Markham shunned him and some of them gave him a severe beating. He wasn’t able to stay at Markham for the rest of the semester and didn’t finish his degree there.

Before Scarlet died, before Owen was called into a police station for questioning, before he settled for Markham U, and before he met Luna, Owen had a shine to him. Everyone saw it. If you’d asked anyone who knew him when he was young, they’d tell you he was going to be somebody. It was assumed that he’d be a working artist, maybe a famous one. There was no denying his talent. And he was handsome and charismatic. (p. 249)

This implies that Owen’s deviation from his presumably destined path didn’t start with Scarlet’s death, or his interrogation, though these bumped him further off course. The rest all followed from his “settling” for Markham. If he hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have known Scarlet. Surprisingly, this passage implies that he would also have been better off if he hadn’t met Luna, though something in his life had already started to go wrong before he did.

The woman who was killed in 2019 was Owen’s wife, Irene. This time, there was no doubt that it was murder: she was shot while out running. Luna discovered her body. In 2019 Luna and Owen are still best friends and live near each other. Shortly before her murder, Irene had confided in Luna that she believed that Owen was having an affair. Luna immediately told Owen about Irene’s suspicion (as Irene must have assumed she’d do), and Owen confirmed to Luna that he had been sleeping with a much younger woman, one of his students. The investigation into Irene’s murder turned up the facts that Irene had been sleeping with Luna’s husband, Sam, for about a year — something that came as a complete surprise to Luna (and to Owen for that matter) — and, more bafflingly, that Irene had a photograph of a sleeping Owen taken nine years before what Owen insisted was their first meeting.

In fact, they had met in London, where Owen had gone to get away from the fallout from Scarlet’s death. Irene had just had her hair dyed blue and was calling herself “Phoebe from Sheffield” with an accent that was good enough to fool Owen, who in turn was pretending (less successfully, as “Phoebe” immediately placed his Boston accent) to be from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The next morning, Irene gave Owen her phone number and was hurt and disappointed when he never called. In fact, he did call and was told by the woman who answered, who must have been Irene’s mother, that he had a wrong number. He had, of course, asked for Phoebe. When they met again in 2014, Owen didn’t recognize Irene as the blue-haired Yorkshirewoman from nine years earlier and she never told him that they had already been to bed together.

Irene’s mother, though she owned the London apartment where Irene was living, was staying there only briefly on the eve of her latest wedding. The reader is left to deduce that Irene hadn’t been expecting anyone other than herself to answer the phone, so she had no reason to worry that Owen knew her by a false name.

On the face of it, The Accomplice appears to be much more a conventional crime/mystery novel than the two books by Lutz that I’ve written about previously. However, there are various little games, tricks and unexpected details, which undermind the naturalism of the storytelling. There are the symmetrical patterns: between Luna’s and Owen’s names, between the two time-frames, each revolving around a dead woman, and between the business with the text messages.

As I mentioned above, Scarlet had been subjecting Owen to a flood of text messages. Owen didn’t reply to any of them, feeling that to ignore them was the best way to convince Scarlet that he wasn’t interested. On the night that Scarlet died, Owen had been one of a group who were drinking in Luna’s room. He left his phone behind when he went back to his own room. Not knowing that Owen wasn’t answering Scarlet’s texts, Luna replied to one of them with “You have to stop, Scarlet. It’s over” (p. 173). After months of silence from Owen, this seemed to Scarlet to indicate a weakening of his resolution, so she sent several more messages, telling him that Luna had a shameful secret and he’d no longer be friends with her if he knew what it was. She wanted him to meet him at the bluff so she could tell him what it was. Luna deleted the whole exchange of texts from Owen’s phone.

The following year, Owen used Luna’s phone to break up her relationship with his own older brother Griff, a lawyer. She was cramming for her final exams and had left the phone with him in the kitchen to avoid distraction. Owen told himself, not very convincingly, that it was for the best that Griff and Luna should break up, that the relationship was unlikely to survive her finishing college anyway, and that being single would help her to focus on her exams.

The thing with Griff had been Luna’s most serious relationship before she married Sam, a surgeon. When Sam and Griff meet for the first time, in the aftermath of Irene’s murder, they’re both wary and a bit confused:

“She told me about you once,” said Sam.

“Good things?” Griff said.

Sam’s eyes squinted in confusion, then amusement. “You broke her fucking heart, man. No. Not that good.” (p. 229)

This obviously comes as news to Griff, who believed that Luna had broken up with him.

The friendship between Luna and Owen is strong and remarkably persistent — I’m tempted to call it “indestructible” — but that’s not to say that it’s perfect or that it’s always healthy for both of them. It’s at its weakest when Luna finds out that it was Owen who broke up her relationship with his brother. At first I found this the most puzzling element of the plot. Why did Owen behave like that? There has always been a certain amount of intersibling tension between the brothers. Griff, the lawyer, is a Type-A personality and their parents’ clear favourite. (One of the detectives calls such people “astronauts”, and agrees that Griff is one.) That changes when Griff falls out with their mother over Owen’s suspicion, when their father dies of cancer more quickly than expected, that her mother “eased the passing” by overdosing him with opioids. Owen thinks this is no big deal but Griff is appalled and confronts their mother, who is outraged and will have nothing further to do with her elder son.

There’s also the fact that, not long before Owen sent the crucial text from Luna’s phone, he had discovered that Griff suspected him of having killed Scarlet after all. This suspicion is based on the fact that Owen knew how Scarlet had been dressed, which he shouldn’t have done if he hadn’t been present when she died. He had told the detective that he hadn’t seen her for months. So, while Owen maintains that he thought he was doing Luna a favour in sending the breakup text, it seems likely that resentment or antipathy towards his brother had more to do with it. When Luna asks him if he feels guilty, he replies “Not that guilty” (p. 404).

Luna, on the other hand, has consistently felt irredeemably guilty since she was eleven years old. That’s why she chooses a third-rate college, it’s probably why she spends so much time lounging around smoking weed, why she gets involved with men (including her eventual husband, Sam) whom Owen finds unimpressive; and why she takes a job she’s completely unsuited for, as a medical representative. In the end, when Irene’s killer is at last identified her reaction puzzled the detectives who have come to give her the news.

“Okay,” Luna said, the tears falling freely.

The feeling was so familiar. Another death she’d have to carry around like dead weight. (p. 412)

That’s when I realized that she has probably also been feeling guilty about Scarlet, who wouldn’t have been on that bluff at dead of night if she hadn’t received a text that she believed came from Owen.

Luna’s guilty feelings are probably the reason that this novel appeals to me so much. I have for years been preoccupied with how a character manages to live under the weight of potentially crushing guilt. I’m not necessarily talking about Dostoyevsky but rather with characters like Mary in Michael Winterbottom’s film Genova (2008) or Ruby in Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). Ruby learns that she has been repressing the memory of her twin sister, of whose death she may have been the cause.

Luna and Owen both end up in careers or jobs that could be viewed as falling short of what they probably expected. Owen teaches art in a school that’s even less prestigious than Markham University, while Luna is unemployed, having turned out not to be very good at selling medicines. Each is effectively being subsidized by his or her spouse: as a surgeon, Sam has a healthy income, while Irene inherited most of her mother’s wealth (which will now pass to Owen). Luna is about to divorce Sam, but there’s a distinct possibility that she might end up with Griff again. In much crime fiction, characters like these would at least be shadyt, and probably villains. Not here, though.

Edition: Titan Books paperback, 2022; emphasis original.