Title: The Arrangement
Author: Miranda Rijks
Publisher: Inkubator Books
Pages: 270
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
This book was okay, but the description on the cover, A psychological thriller with a stunning twist,' was a stretch of the imagination. The premise of this book was better than the
execution.
The Prologue is written in the third person present
tense PoV of the killer, as he/she watches the victim and then kills her in
cold blood.
In Chapter 1, we are taken to the first-person present
tense PoV of Grace Woods, a divorced single mother of two girls, 21-year-old
Abigail and 17-year-old Ella. We meet Grace on the morning on which the police
inform her that Abigail, who had gone on a holiday to Cape Town, has been found
dead on a beach there.
Grace’s ex-husband Bob is now settled into his new
life, with wife Sue and 5-year-old son. But Grace whose life is invested in her
daughters finds herself broken and relapsing into an alcohol addiction that she
had steered away from for a decade. Her best friends, Natasha and Ruth pitch in
to help the household.
Slowly Grace discovers things about Abi that she finds
hard to believe. She learns that Abi was a sugar baby, who had three regular
sugar daddies, that she arrived at Cape Town a full five days before she was to
meet her close friends, Becky and Ethan, the daughter and son of Natasha and Ruth
respectively, and that she was pregnant.
South African police arrest a drug addict for the
murder of Abi and close the case, but Grace can’t accept this as the truth. Her
intuition tells her that Abi’s death was not a random killing.
But somebody is not happy with Grace’s snooping. She
begins to receive threats and feels conflicted about whether to look for the
truth or get on with her life. When her anxiety gets the better of her, she
takes recourse to alcohol, and slowly loses her grip on reality.
Will Grace solve the mystery of who killed her
daughter? Or will the killer get to her?
Between the main narrative from Grace’s PoV, we see blog
posts from Anya’s blog. Anya was the pseudonym under which Abigail featured on
the sugar daddy site. The style of writing is markedly different from the style
used in Grace’s narrative.
The author did a fabulous job of showing Grace’s decline,
the speed at which she gives way, giving in to her addiction and messing her
relationship with her only living daughter, Ella. It also prompts us to think
of her as being a not-quite-reliable witness.
But it occupied far too much space in the story. I can’t stand it when protagonists give in to their alcohol
addictions and sleepwalk their way through the plot. It’s an easy plot trope that
almost all thriller authors take recourse to, particularly if the character is
female. I’d like to see a novel in which the protagonist isn’t addicted to substances
of any kind.
The book unwittingly poses a critique of marriages,
where ultimately every secure relationship seems to show the strain. The other
characters such as Natasha and Ruth have stable marriages, but the chinks in
their relationships are showing.
The book held my interest well, but I would have liked
it even more if there had been less of Grace’s alcohol addiction and more of
the dynamics between the sugar daddies and the sugar babies. The book purports
to hinge on the arrangement and I expected to see more of that. It was unbelievable
that a sugar daddy would pay vast sums of money for a platonic relationship. Those
old men are sleazy and they aren’t about to shower fortunes for some pleasant
chit-chat.
At the end of it, I didn’t know what to think of Abi.
I didn’t find her likeable, certainly not the way her close friends projected
her as having made the world a better place. Just how did she do that? Becky
and Ethan both swore that she was a great friend, but we didn’t get to see any
of that in real time.
Also, Ella, at 17, should have been a lot more mature
and at least attempted to understand her mother. There are kids way younger who
mature fast when tragedy enters their lives. But Ella chose to cry for help and
run to her father’s house.
Some more chapters from Abi’s PoV might have helped us
to understand her motivations. The blog posts are not enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment