The Pact by Amy Heydenrych

          There is so much that I found wrong in this book that I am not entirely sure where best to start.  For a start the title is confusing, there is no real "pact".  I guess the title refers to the final reveal of what happened to Nicole and that page and half contains a pact of sorts.  Maybe a better title would have been The Entitled or The Clueless.

As you can tell, I really didn't like this book and I did struggle to finish it.  After allowing myself a few DNF's in 2018 I was determined that 2019 would be different so I powered through but it took a lot of bribery to get me there.

First off the characters in this book are entirely unsympathetic and to say it is written by a woman the female characters in particular are written in an almost misogynistic way.  They are either power hungry shrews (Nicole), the delicate ingenue who is afraid of her own shadow (Freya) or tough cookies with a frail centre and trust issues (Isla).  The men are either manipulative narcissists (Jay, Julian) or tender ciphers (Simon).  Nobody feels like a rounded person on the page or as though they have any basis in reality  which is happen as well as if you met anyone this one dimensional in reality the world would probably implode with the banality of it all.

The plot itself jumps around to cover Freya's tough college days when she was living out of her car, through her early days at Atypical (a tech start up from hell) and for a few months after the murder of Freya.  Whilst used to the flashback style of storytelling I found that it really grated in this book.  There was no continuity to which timeline we were going to be in and you could literally go from a page and a half set in the here and now then to a page 4 years ago and then get 3 pages of a month before the murder.  I can understand what the author was trying to achieve with this but it is so incredibly bitty it undermines the device.

Ultimately, the plot centres around a so-called prank that Freya plays on Nicole which then backfires spectacularly.  However, the blurb and the first half of the book make you think it backfires in one way when it turns out that all that is smoke and mirrors and it actually goes very wrong in a different way (yawn!).  I honestly am not sure what disappointed me most; the lacklustre characters or the pedestrian plot with a very thin idea stretched so far as to become almost invisible.

The only thing that stopped this being a 1 Star read was the fact that it highlighted office politics and work place bullying.  Something that any wage slave is more than aware off and usually suffers through at least once in their working life.  Other than that for me this is one to avoid.

THIS IS AN HONEST REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED FROM READERS FIRST.