October means thrillers, thrillers, thrillers and more thrillers! Today's read? The Arrangement!


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. 



As always, a copy of this book was provided by the publisher or author in exchange for my honest review. This does not effect my opinion in any way.

The first thing you should know about The Arrangement is that from the moment you open it, you develop an arrangement with it: you're not moving for a while, unless you absolutely have to. It is very, very gripping and demands your attention from the very start. The second thing you should know about it, is that that it is highly enthralling and bleak. It is one of the most addictive reads I've come across this year and was everything I hoped it be.

Relationships can go wrong, no matter the setting and context. In the case of the haziness that is The Arrangement, it is that of a relationship between sugar daddies and sugar babies. As far as premises go, this one is fairly simple at its core. Unraveling it is another story entirely. Full of the dramatics and critical nature you'd expect based on synopsis alone, you never know quite what to expect from this suspense. The entirety of it is almost never ending in its thrills and readers will find themselves wanting to, somehow, turn the pages faster and faster.

The best words to describe this one are: indulgent, chilling, wild and intense. Because of these descriptions, The Arrangement is the perfect read for autumn. Robyn Harding is definitely one of those writers who's prose leads us down a path of compulsion--before we know it, we are engulfed in her atmospheric words and are nearing their conclusion.

As far as the who and the what goes in this novel, you'll find yourself drawn into this web and the lifestyles which surround it. From the very beginning, I was hooked and wanted nothing more than to unravel the big mystery and understand what the heck was going on. All around me, I felt to be entangled with the central story arches and wondered: who did what? I found myself lost to the twisty domestic thriller and held an array of feelings towards Natalie and Gabe--everything about their world and relationship was all consuming in an odd way.

(Odd may not be the best word. But between the set emotions and questions I had, and I'm sure you will, too, you'll come to understand why I can only call it such.)

The Arrangement is a breathless, read-in-one-sitting, lose yourself, read and I cannot recommend it enough. If the synopsis reads as something you'd even be slightly interested in, you'll definitely be intrigued by what lay inside. Robyn Harding creates a well written thriller; leaving us all on the edges of our seat in wonder, confusion, fear and more. You will be seduced.