Title: THE ARRANGEMENT
Expected publication: 1 September 2019
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
Natalie, an art student in New York City, is struggling to
pay her bills when a friend makes a suggestion: Why not find a sugar daddy – a
wealthy, older man who will pay her for dates, and a monthly
allowance. All that’s required is to look pretty. Sexual favours are
optional.
Gabe, a handsome 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, who he has no intention of leaving.
When he abruptly ends things, Nat can’t let go. She begins drinking heavily and stalking Gabe and his family. Their supposedly mutually beneficial arrangement devolves into a nightmare of deception, obsession and, when a body is found near Gabe’s Upper East Side apartment, murder.
Gabe, a handsome 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, who he has no intention of leaving.
When he abruptly ends things, Nat can’t let go. She begins drinking heavily and stalking Gabe and his family. Their supposedly mutually beneficial arrangement devolves into a nightmare of deception, obsession and, when a body is found near Gabe’s Upper East Side apartment, murder.
My musings:
I love books that transport me into a completely different
scene, and Harding’s foray into the world of sugar daddies and sugar babies was
a real revelation for me. If you are like me, and haven’t heard of the term
before: a sugar baby is a beautiful young woman, often a student, who will date
a wealthy older man for a fee. It’s a bit like an escort service, only that the
sugar daddy will often pay large sums of money and gifts to his sugar baby for
her company. Sex is often involved, but not always. It’s needless to say that
this arrangement attracts a fair share of creeps and predators, and that things
can go wrong on many different levels. Google the term and you will find a
spade of murders related to the whole sugar baby scene.
So when Natalie, a poor art student who has just lost her
low paying job in hospitality and can no longer afford her rent in her flat
share in New York, enters a sugar daddy / sugar baby arrangement with the
confident and rich Gabe, I instantly feared for her. Natalie is a bit of an
innocent, a girl from the country who has grown up without a father in her
life, and who craves love and stability – probably not the type of girl who is
suited to such an arrangement. “Pretty Woman” it is not – for Gabe to pay a
princely sum for Natalie’s company, she is expected to perform certain “services”
and live up to Gabe’s expectations. Most of all, she is as much a status symbol
as a new car, or an expensive suit, and just as expendable when he tires of
her. This is never going to end well, is it?
I will not reveal any more about the story, other than to
say that it instantly had me intrigued. Harding writes well, and the story
moves along at a good pace, setting the scene and building up a degree of
danger as we realise what Natalie’s arrangement entails. This was the type of
book that made me feel like a tourist on planet earth, because Natalie’s
reality was so far removed from my own sheltered life that I often found myself
gobsmacked by the things she is experiencing. I could relate to the poor
student existence – hadn’t I myself lived on minute noodles in grungy shared
apartments in my youth? - but the whole sugar daddy scene was totally new to
me. From here, Harding spins a compelling tale that soon ends in someone’s
death – the who and how you will have to find out for yourself.
Harding has obviously done her research and states in her
author’s notes that she had interviewed several sugar babies prior to writing
this novel to be able to give her story a solid background. This really shone
through for me in believable characters that were easy to relate to. If I
wanted to spark a lively debate, I would read this in a book group, as the mere
term sugar baby / sugar daddy would have some of my peers’ blood boiling!
Summary:
All in all, this was an intriguing, original and compelling
mystery that had me glued to the pages. I would have been just as happy to
leave the ending shrouded in a bit of mystery, but other readers not similarly
inclined will be happy to hear that it all wrapped up nicely and all is
explained in the final reveal. I now need to read the author’s other books, in
particularly HER PRETTY FACE, which has been on my wish list for a long time!
Thank
you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster Australia for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
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