THE PERFECT ESCAPE

4 stars out of 5

Four more dysfunctional females would (I hope) be hard to find. Finding four whose lives intertwined would be even harder. Toss in at least two men who themselves are in need serious psychological intervention and a murder, and you've got an entertaining story that reeled me in from the start.

The three main women are Sam, Margaret and Diana - New Yorkers who have met fairly recently but bonded mostly because of their trials and tribulations involving men. They decide to head off on a weekend getaway to be filled with a ton of commiserating and probably two tons of alcohol (not necessarily in that order). They rent a car, but when they stop for gas they encounter a problem with the vehicle; one of the women knows of a place to stay in the small town they're near. Reluctantly, the other two agree to make the unscheduled overnight pitstop and head out to their original destination the next morning.

Best-laid plans, though, have a way of, well, you know. After a quick settling in at the new rental house, they head out for a night on the town to get a head start on their to-do list for the rest of the weekend. One drink leads to another, and another as well as encounters with those aforementioned males and a third who may or may not be trustworthy. After the Triumvirate go their separate ways - supposedly to reconnoiter before leaving the next morning - Diana turns up missing. Sam and Margaret are frantic, understandably, but then reality intrudes, bringing with it thoughts that the stop they believed was a fluke may have been intentional.

But with Diana still out of the picture, who can the other two trust? Probably not their exes, who if they'd been trustworthy in the first place wouldn't be exes now - or the new guy on the block who seems too good to be true, or the fourth woman to enter the mix, the one who's now married to one of those exes and conveniently lives in the very same small town.

Once the local police get involved, though, the plot thickens even more. While the cops weren't too eager to get involved in the disappearance of an adult woman, especially one apparently drunk out of her gourd, that changes when a ton of blood turns up accompanied by a dead body. Add to that missing keys, missing wedding rings and a bunch of cold hard cash and you've got a hard-to-put-down book that works despite - or maybe because of - all the characters I hope I never meet. Thanks to the publisher, via NetGalley, for allowing me to read and review a pre-release copy. 

The Perfect Escape by Leah Konen (G.P. Putnam's Sons, January 2022); 383 pp.