Corporate scandals retold from a wife's perspective

Asked to pick the worst-ever case of corporate chicanery, a writer of hardboiled crime novels named Lemuel Samuel "couldn't decide between Enron and LinkAge".

That telling moment linking fact and fiction comes in Jacqueline Carey's novel, It's a Crime. A strangely comic morality tale, it features a telecom outfit called LinkAge, its acute accounting foibles and the $140 billion its shareholders lose when the Securities and Exchange Commission steps in and the stock drops to 60 cents.

The fall guy at LinkAge, accountant Frank Foy, gets caught up in a scandal that echoes real ones of recent years – post-dated invoices, disguised debt, co-operative auditors. Foy (an old word for faith) believes in his Chief Financial Officer, Neil Culp (as in culpa or fault): "Under his leadership accounting became an arcane, secret, and living art." Frank goes to jail and Neil seems to skate.

Before his fall, a merger and promotions had let Frank trade up to a trophy home in northern New Jersey on the highest and priciest of his town's socially stratifying hills.

He developed his own "signifiers of the good life": a stainless-steel kitchen, peeled shrimp at every cocktail party, a remote control for each electronic device.

Carey puts Frank's family rather than LinkAge at centre stage and tells the story through his uncommonly unwitting 44-year-old wife, Pat, as she slowly awakens to the destruction spawned by her husband's business.

"Pat didn't understand right away" are the novel's first words. As she copes with Frank's absence, her teenage daughter's rebellion, her Princeton daughter's told-you-sos, and the withering of her landscaping business, Pat embarks on a clumsy campaign to pay back ruined shareholders. She also renews ties with two people she'd lost track of: her best teenage friend, the misfit Virginia who shared her love of mystery novels and has been devastated by LinkAge, and the aforementioned, name-rhyming Lemuel Samuel, Pat's off-and-on lover.

The past can be a refuge when the present turns awful, but these old ties will unravel again.

The Foys will go broke, left with only the house, the stainless steel, the remotes.

In a short-story collection and two previous novels, Carey has shown a keen eye and wit in writing about lives formed by the pleasures and pressures of New York City. To such people, the suburban Foys may be what happens when you live too far from Manhattan. Carey isn't that simplistic, and she herself lives in New Jersey.