The Pact
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A mystery for anyone who has ever hated a friend's boyfriend…
Rachel Benjamin and her friends aren't looking forward to Emma's wedding. The groom is a rat, and nobody can understand what Emma sees in him. So when he turns up dead on the morning of the ceremony, no one in the wedding party is all that upset. Not even Emma.
Rachel, who had the good fortune to find Richard floating facedown in the pool, is feeling as if she's woken up in an Agatha Christie novel. It doesn't help that everyone around her seems to have a motive for murder. So, while the cops detain Emma's family and friends at her isolated Adirondacks compound for the weekend, Rachel, an investment banker by trade, makes like Miss Marple (minus the gray hair and sensible shoes) and does some digging of her own.
Her investigation gets especially tricky when Peter Forrest, the too-good-to-be-true best man, turns out to be both her number-one love interest and her number-one suspect. And Rachel can't help remembering the solemn pact she and her friends made back in college — a promise to rescue each other from bad relationships, using any means required. Has someone taken the pact too far?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the prologue of this breezy, absorbing mystery, Rachel Benjamin and her four college girlfriends promise to keep each other from romancing unlikable men by whatever means necessary. A decade later, the still-close group reunites at a lavish Adirondack vacation home for the wedding of one member to the utterly despicable Richard. The rehearsal dinner finds the friends lamenting the senseless match and their inability to keep the pact, but their distress doesn't last long: on the morning of the wedding, Rachel discovers Richard dead in the pool. Suddenly, the house guests including the girlfriends, the bride's parents and the groom's attractive best man, Peter are all suspects. While policemen survey the scene, Rachel embarks on a well-intentioned, clumsy and often-misguided search for the murderer and an equally awkward romantic pursuit of Peter. Quirky Rachel aside, the characters are one-dimensional, and the dialogue is superficial; Sturman's writing is comic, but laden with clich s. So why is this debut so thoroughly enjoyable? Perhaps it's because Rachel is such a winning detective: she sifts through clues at the reader's pace and does so with wit and pluck. The novel's mise-en-sc ne successful, attractive Ivy League graduates at a lakeside mansion makes for escapist pleasure, and well-placed cliffhangers, a careful distribution of motives and unexpected twists promise readers light, satisfying suspense.
