Book Review: "The Retirement Plan" by Sue Hincenbergs

I needed something a bit lighter. If you've been paying attention to the blog then you'll know that I've been reading some indie horror, some very emotional fiction and obviously, some Dostoevsky. Mixing it up to read a breezy comedy muddled with some crime is something that I definitely need to wind the atmosphere down. I cannot lie though, I am really itching to read some ghost stories or some contemporary horror. If you don't like my horror reviews (and judging by my stats that's a lot of you) then I apologise. I'll try to keep things fresh but for now, there's just certain things I need to repair myself.

The book starts off with a bunch of friends: Pam, Nancy, Shalisa, and Marlene - and they have been friends for decades. They are literally the perfect pictures of suburban life. They are women who are older than what we normally get as characters in these novels and they are tied together by their joined sense of purpose and their wants for comfortable retirements. However, their husbands start investing together and it all goes horrible wrong and they lose a ton of money they feel as though they had earned together. It shatters their world. Everything from their marriages to their friendships become more and more strained as their finances become fewer and fewer in supply.

However, Marlene's husband, David, dies in an accident. It shakes her world but with the large life insurance payout that she gets, she manages to move to a lovely resort and buys a house on the beach. She becomes one of those affluent widows where you always wonder what the freak accident was. She becomes the envy of all of her friends and then, they all seem to have a similar idea in order to secure themselves a future: they must kill their husbands. Honestly, this is both funny and kind of unsettling. The women automatically go straight to the fact that killing their husbands would not only provide them with the affluent retirement they desire, but it will also break them out of the drudgery of suburban performative niceties, something that women more than men seem to be stuck in by marriage.

The actual plan is that they will hire someone to do it for them. Whilst they are planning this meticulously, the husbands are stealing from the casinos where they work. They plan to restart their lives after they get back all the money they lost in their investments. They start to become more and more suspicious of David's death, sensing a weird and uneasy danger around and choose to protect themselves against it. This is where Hector comes up. Hector is the man that the wives have hired to kill their husbands, but Hector is also the guy the men have hired for their own protection. Honestly, this idea of them both hiring the same person is absolutely hilarious. It genuinely feels like something straight out of a 1950s comedy movie, it is simply ridiculous and that is the whole point.

The novel has so many twists and random mishaps. It definitely intends the reader to have a good time chasing these people around, deciphering their clues and fears, making sure that everyone gets what is coming to them. The writer injects hilarious dialogue and situations that feel so out-there that even though I don't really enjoy comedy novels that much, this one felt quite hilarious and pleasantly so. I only really bought it because it was cheap and yet, I came to really enjoy myself. I was quite glad to see that women were still felt as main characters of a book when they were over a certain age rather than just being young and perfect all the time. These are real women who have lived decades of their lives on the sidelines.

All in all, I had a great time with this book. It was a one-sitting read, yes but I genuinely did not think I would enjoy it the way I did. Look at it this way: I don't watch comedy movies 99% of the time - only if I'm really upset. I almost never read comedy novels and yet this one: hilarious and has some deeper meanings when it comes to the inequalities in marriage that women face.