Best Friends Forever by Margot Hunt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The story centers around Alice, a somewhat meek math-teacher-cum-stay-at-home-mom, and her best friend (hence the title) Kat, a fabulously wealthy, hard-drinking, outrageous socialite. The first two-thirds of the book are almost entirely anecdotes of Kat convincing or browbeating Alice into drinking bouts, luxurious holidays, etc. There are some stretches of exposition here and there giving some background on other characters, especially the husbands of both and a few other relatives, but after the first four or five chapters you can pretty much skip liberally and not miss much, although there is a murder and an investigation begins somewhere around Chapter 18. At Chapter 23, one of the two gets arrested for murder. My inner self exclaimed “Finally! Something actually happened”). In other words, it was boring up to that point.
I can squeeze out a three star rating primarily because the prose was readable and kept me interested enough to finish it, but my final reaction was one of disappointment largely because the author’s earlier work For Better and Worse was excellent, so I expected more. The ending of this one wasn’t something I foresaw, but it wasn’t something that surprised me, either. Since none of the characters was likeable, it seemed quite possible the author could pick anyone to be the murderer. The gratuitous information at the end about other deaths besides the central one in the story left a sour taste in my mouth, too. TMI.