This story follows music teacher Bonnie during the summer that she was planning on getting her life together a bit. Instead, she finds herself disposing of a corpse and hiding evidence from the police. The story is told in alternating chapters of "before" and "after" the discovery of the corpse as we unravel what, exactly, happened that evening. TW/CW: 2 instances of on-page physical domestic abuse
I really enjoyed the overall premise and structure of the book. I'm a sucker for dual timelines and it was fun to hop around in time and see how something we find out in one time comes up in the other. The book opens with Bonnie finding the body but she never tells the reader who it is. It is always 'him' or 'his' and she doesn't really give away any hints to what her connection with the dead person is. We then jump back in time and see Bonnie putting together this ragtag band of musicians for her friend's wedding and they are mostly all men. So we can assume that one of these men ends up dead, but we don't know which for about the first 1/3 of the book. It was pretty fun to read along and guess which of them would be killed and possible motives for all of these characters. Even once we do find out who dies, we don't know for sure the how or why behind the death. The timeline switching continues to reveal pieces of the story that we don't know in a pretty intriguing way. However, the last 2/3 of the story did take a bit of a downhill turn for me.
As a character-focused reader, I'm really forgiving on the actual plot elements if the character work is superb. However, I found both characters and plot to be lacking in this story for me. We spend the first 1/3 of the book meeting all these people in Bonnie's life - first her friends and then all these musicians. The book does a really good job at grounding these characters in their personalities and other identifying characteristics so I didn't get confused. However, I was expecting a bit of character growth over the course of the story. It really felt that the characters started out as a bit of a caricature in order to help the reader keep them all straight but then they stayed that way even after the death of someone in their group. And even if the side characters maybe weren't as developed as I would have liked, I think Bonnie should have had much more of a character arc than she did. She found the body of someone she knew and decided to dispose of it. I would expect something like that to have a much more profound effect on a person. Bonnie is effected by it, but sort of in a weird way where she's walking around in a bit of a brain fog which didn't feel that different to how she was living her life before. If Bonnie was super on top of her game really taking charge of her life and then suddenly changed to floating through her days then I think that would be really interesting. But the character shift we get from her isn't as dramatic as I think it needed to be in order to have the last part of the book be interesting from a character perspective.
As for the plot, I was generally much more interested in the 'after' chapters but even those, eventually, lost my interest. The 'before' chapters are just a bunch of mediocre musicians practicing together and making little snippy comments at each other. I didn't really find them engaging or interesting and while they did reveal some pieces of information, I wish they were shorter or possibly cut out the practicing altogether. Most of the information we need for the investigation is revealed either before or after the band practice. I understand that the band aspect is needed to push the timeline along but I really think these chapters could have ended right when they started to practice. The 'after' chapters, after a while, became really boring for me too. They couldn't hold the tension of the investigation for me and I overall ended up not caring if they ever found out exactly what happened that night. I think the main issue with the 'after' chapters is that Bonnie thinks she knows what happened (but she doesn't tell the reader) so she isn't concerned with finding out the truth. There's no amateur investigation or anything like that, she's more concerned about if she's going to get caught for hiding the body. This story takes place in London which has CCTV cameras everywhere. These cameras are brought up a number of times throughout the beginning half of the book and I thought they were going to be a bigger source of tension/fear for Bonnie than they ended up being. I basically wanted the tension turned up to 11 and for Bonnie to be more involved in the investigation elements.
Overall, I really enjoyed the premise and first 1/3 of the story, but found the back 2/3 to be completely underwhelming and lacking the tension and character development I would have expected from the premise.
Thanks to NetGalley and William Morrow Paperbacks for the ARC
Expected publication date is April 27, 2021 (originally published in 2009 under the title Complicit)
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