My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 (4 stars)
Publisher: Scout Press
Book review lovers, my review posting hiatus has come to an end (as autumn is upon us) so let's get right to my review of The Arrangement by Robyn Harding.
The salaciousness of the Sugar Baby/Sugar Daddy dynamic aside, this was a story that was compulsively readable and also ended up making me ever grateful for the father I drew in the cosmic lottery.
Nat's relationship with her father spilled over into every part of her disastrous life and while it was compelling to read it struck me as profoundly sad. There are likely women who have good paternal relationships who take up this lifestyle but Nat was truly a cautionary tale. Her relationship with her mother wasn't good either and that didn't help. Grant also plays as ghost father to his own daughter and that too led to disastrous results. Though he felt the one who'd been abandoned and done wrong himself. Truly a selfish guy, awful father and crappy husband. Quite the accomplishment.
It turned out that I'd figured out the "Whodunnit" in the murder but relating the "How" was very well done. As a book that opens with the fact of a murder and a character already copping to it, the tension was pretty well done. I read this at a crack-fic speed, which was great as I was on vacay. The author had some deft and memorable lines that I very much enjoyed. I'd happily read another by Robyn Harding.
Recommended.
Summary: Natalie, a young art student in New York City, is struggling to pay her bills when a friend makes a suggestion: Why not go online and find a sugar daddy—a wealthy, older man who will pay her for dates, and even give her a monthly allowance? Lots of girls do it, Nat learns. All that’s required is to look pretty and hang on his every word. Sexual favours are optional.
Though more than thirty years her senior, Gabe, a handsome corporate finance attorney, seems like the perfect candidate, and within a month, they are madly in love. At least, Nat is…Gabe already has a family, whom he has no intention of leaving.
So when he abruptly ends things, Nat can’t let go. She begins drinking heavily and stalking him: watching him at work, spying on his wife, even befriending his daughter, who is not much younger than she is. But Gabe’s not about to let his sugar baby destroy his perfect life. What was supposed to be a mutually beneficial arrangement devolves into a nightmare of deception, obsession, and, when a body is found near Gabe’s posh Upper East Side apartment, murder.
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