"The Pact has no divorces, but it also has more widows and widowers than you would expect." I really wasn't sure what to expect from The Marriage Pact. The title sounded a bit Mills and Boon, and I'd never heard of the author. In fact I was engrossed from the start, and - while a love story is at the novel's core - there's nothing remotely Mills and Boon about it. Newlyweds Jake - a psychotherapist mainly working with relationship counselling - and Alice - a former rock musician turned lawyer - are both intrigued and flattered when invited to join The Pact, a somewhat shadowy organisation devoted to ensuring its members stay married. As it turns out, they have some rather unusual methods of ensuring that. Things quickly become rather weird and unpleasant. Then they become even weirder and more unpleasant. Still, they can just leave.... can't they? Tightly plotted and skilfully characterised (the story is told by Jake, but I particularly liked Alice, who had a certain unpredictability about her), this is a thoroughly absorbing read, even if a few questions remained unanswered by the end. The apparently limitless capacity of The Pact to know exactly what's going on in its members lives all the time is never really explained. And I felt Alice and Jake - and indeed the other members - were a little too ready to (almost literally) sign their lives away without finding out more about what they were potentially letting themselves in for. A certain suspension of disbelief was necessary in order for the story to work, though.
Most of the way through, I was wondering how on earth this was going to end and how Alice and Jake could possibly extricate themselves from the nightmare they'd stumbled into. Safe to say, the ending was unexpected. Satisfying? I'm still not sure, but it's hard to come up with an alternative.
All in all a compelling read with, ultimately, some interesting things to say about love and marriage.
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