Jessie Thorpe

Bolton Roper Jessie Thorpe

We first meet Brooke Roper, a beautiful American woman, as she gazes from her apartment balcony at the Italian sky above and the bustling street of Milan below. But her calmness disguises her severe inner turmoil. Brooke feels a growing panic about her station in life and her marriage to Bolton ("Tony") Roper, ostensibly an American businessman who is actually an undercover CIA operative. It is the summer of 1988, and the Cold War is winding down. But Milan remains a hotbed of Soviet agents, and Tony seems deeply involved in an increasingly dangerous situation. The plot unfolds via Brooke's recollections of that incident, of her interactions with her two visiting sisters-the oblivious Christina, with whom she shares several adventures in the villages and towns along the Amalfi Coast, in Naples, and in Pompeii; and the imperious Fleur, who startles Brooke into revealing the deepest secret of her marriage-and of her fierce, almost obsessive devotion to her husband, which leads her to the two most fateful and drastic decisions of her life. Bolton Roper is an intensely romantic, deeply haunting journey, both physical and emotional, amid the unique people and lush locations of Italy, within the banal suburbs of Washington, D. C., and at the family home amid the bucolic landscape of a small Michigan town. Always vividly and arrestingly recounted, Brooke's reverie is the unforgettable story of the wife of a spy.