I was really intrigued from the first page. Newly married couple who are chalk and cheese, yet connect on so many levels. They receive mysterious wedding gift from a famous musician who was invited to the wedding at the last minute. They end up signing up to a marriage pact, which sound like like a good idea.....at the time! What can be better than group of happily married especially chosen group of people who can help you make sure that your marriage lasts?

This book kept me swinging from this is a good idea to this is getting disturbing to maybe it will work to surely not! Really a well written rollercoaster ride.

This book really affected me.... the way in which a "normal" couple became embroiled in a very abnormal situation was scary. I found the book difficult to put down and lost sleep in order to finish it. It caused me to think hard about aspects of my own marriage - and actually there were some elements of the pact that I felt could be a positive thing to adopt. It is not often a work of fiction would cause me to consider making a change within my own life! Definitely recommended.

This book grabbed me from the first page. It was the first book I had read by this author and I will definitely be looking out for any future releases. Perfect for girl on the train fans

The Marriage Pact, is based on the premise of no divorce. I found the plot really interesting, along the lines of The Stepford Wives, and a really interesting premise for a thriller. Like most newly weds, Jake and Alice dont envisage ever getting divorce so are happy to sign The Pact.
This is a fast paced page turner that will you will want to read in one sitting. There is a sinister undercurrent to The Pact, it has a much darker side than anticipated.
The Marriage Pact is an erudite thriller, with tension aplenty and a brilliant premise; utterly irresistible.

The Marriage Pact by Michelle Richmond is not a chic lit but a psychological suspense novel examining how far two people will go to save/stay in their marriage. Alice is a successful lawyer, Jake a partner in a psychology practice and are about to get married. Alice invites a client, Liam, to their wedding, he gives them a box without a key.

They agree to meet the holder of the key, Vivian, who makes the suggestion that they enter The Pact - "a group of like-minded individuals’ intent on achieving a similar goal". The Marriage Pact means that they have entered into cannot be broken and is a lifelong commitment". The Pact requires Alice and Jake to be invested in their marriage, give monthly gifts, plan trips once a quarter with no tag along friends/family etc. All the rules are laid out in The Manual. There are consequences/penalties (misdemeanours or felonies depending upon the seriousness of the offence) if The Pact is not adhered to! Penalties range from the seemingly innocuous - the recreant member is put under further observation, made to wear a GPS bracelet, for example, to reeducation and finally disappearance as nobody leaves The Pact alive.

Jake and Alice agree to enter The Pact but it all goes pear shaped when monthly gifts and holidays are forgotten. interest in the marriage wanes. Jake meets someone, Jo-Anne, who he knew from University. She is also part of The Pact and warns him it is much more dangerous than it first appears. Their Pact Friends find out and the penalties are severe! No one can leave The Pact alive so Jake and Alice spend weeks trying to balance their lives but still receiving painful and intrusive consequences which culminate in the disappearance of Alice. He flies to Ireland to beg the creator of the Pact to release them from this life long commitment.


The story is told through Jake's eyes and the chapters are very short. I normally don't like novels written in the first person narrative and I only got into the book and started enjoying the plot by chapter 7 and there is a great plot twist at then end that I did not see coming. The shortness of the chapters makes the story seem choppy and a series of thoughts that don't flow together. The premise of the book is great, the execution of it is unusual and I think that, for me, is where it misses the mark and fell down slightly.

To be published in numerous magazines in September: Newlyweds Alice and Jake are invited to join The Pact. The group seems to have just one goal – making marriages work. All members need to do is agree to follow the rules for a happy marriage, and accept support if they struggle. However, as Alice and Jake soon find out, there are consequences for breaking the rules, and The Pact is, like marriage, for life. A tense psychological thriller you’ll want to devour in one sitting.

What an unusual concept, brilliantly written and captivating from the first chapter. I predict this book will become a best seller and maybe even a film. It has just the right tension and menace without being unbelievable. I'm not going to be searching out Pact members as I don't think I could abide by all their rules however I may implement some of the ideas

An amazing read, amazing plot, characters that feel like you know them better than they know themselves and twists and turns at keep you hooked from the off. Set in San Francisco two successful very much in love people get married and look forward to their lives together - forever - be careful what you might wish for!

Jake & Alice are young and successful. On their wedding day their receive an invitation to join a Marriage Pact group. This seems an excellent organisation which supports its members to work hard at their marriage - planning trips, giving gifts, not working late. Jake & Alice embark on this in a rather shaky manner not always adhering to the rules. Unfortunately these are rules & not guidelines and the punishments for breaking them are harsh.

I really enjoyed the start of this book. Jake & Alice were keen to make their marriage work & started to embrace the Pact. They met like minded people and when things went wrong they received guidance to get back on track. As things progressed they realised that things were a little more sinister with a lot of surveillance and ever increasing punishments. In my opinion, this is where it all went wrong. The secret of a psychological thriller is to build suspense and allow the reader to imagine the atmosphere building. The reader puts themselves in the character's position and starts to feel tense at the idea of people watching their every move or being publicly humilated. However once the author takes it beyond this the supense is lost. The punishments dished out to Alice and Jake become rather farcical & unbelievable. I am talking torture such as electric shocks for an hour, head braces being worn for a month, head shaving and beatings. The suspense has gone. I find the suspense of what the people watching you could do is more powerful than the reality of descriptions of torture. I felt the book had lost its way and also its credibility.

Once the book had lost its way it became quite boring with more descriptions of punishments and eventually of Jake & Alice trying to escape. The ending of the book just did not work at all. I won't explain as you may wish to read this book but suffice to say that it just did not work for me.

It is a great shame that the author chose to take the Pact to extremes. The psychological tension is always more fascinating than whatever physical things the author can write. A reader's imagination can create more tension & fear than ever a writer's can. You only need to read some of the brilliant psychological authors of recent times (Minette Waters springs to mind) to realise where this author went wrong.

Thank you Netgalley and the Publisher. Could you imagine being married to someone and being obligated to stay with them forever with no way out ? Because you made a Marriage Pact to stay together? And you love each other and you were already making the commitment and it seemed fun, exciting, ominous and oh so mysterious, this is what this book is about and a bit more besides. Good read

This book had an interesting enough 'hook' a newly wed couple, with a solid background are sweet-talked into joining what they think is an exclusive type of club, called 'The Pact'. Taking it all as a bit of a joke they sign on the dotted line and quickly find out they have signed up for something which isn't what they thought and was dangerous to get out of.

Once the initial intrigue wore off I found this book pretty predictable, pedestrian and the couple pretty boring. By about half-way into the book I was pretty sure where it was heading and began to lose interest. Sure, there are a few twists and turns, but there really isn't anything I haven't read before and we seem to be overburdened with these types of thrillers also.

Michelle Richmond's novel, The Marriage Pact is dark, twisty and impossible to put down. It begins with a scene we encounter again later so we know from the start that The Pact is sinister. We know that, in hindsight, Alice and Jake would not have joined The Pact and this makes us more curious and more anxious for them as the story develops.

Alice and Jake have an odd relationship. They met in rehab and we get the sense that Jake, a therapist, wants to 'fix' his new wife. He wants her to belong only to him, whilst openly disapproving of many parts of her life and personality. We see their marriage constantly compared to those around them, both in The Pact and in the marriage therapy sessions Jake delivers at work.

The Pact is a wedding gift they receive from someone Alice has just met. It promises a lifelong, happy marriage but is that what it delivers? The Pact sounds appealing but it is much more sinister and we don't discover how sinister it is until we get towards the very end. Michelle keeps us guessing and even when we think we know what's going to happen next, there's another surprise around the corner.

Throughout the book I found myself comparing Alice, Jake and The Pact's idea of marriage with my own and wondering how my husband and I would fare under such strict rules. At times I found myself agreeing that some of the rules could make for a happy relationship, but the methods they use are old-fashioned and brutal. I would suggest proceeding with caution if torture is a triggering issue for you.

The story seems to be based around the idea of taking "something living, marriage in this case, and (tearing) it apart to the smallest cell, to see how it works", and this proves to be a fascinating exploration.

Some parts of the writing are a little jarring, for example, the text conversation between Alice and Finnegan after she opens the gift seems a little stilted, there is a lot of commentary on teenagers and social media/ smartphones which doesnt always flow with the story, and it troubles me that Jake invites one of the teenagers he works with to his home, but it is generally very well written. Jake is an interesting narrator and I often wondered what the story would be like told from Alice's point of view as Jake's  is often clouded by his doubts and insecurities

The Mariage Pact is a brilliant thriller. It is never predictable and the twists, betrayals and unexpected events keep you hooked until the very last page.

I thought I would review this wonderful book whilst listening to "Ain't No Cure For Love" by Leonard Cohen as the song somehow connects with Jake and Alice's relationship within their marriage. They fall innocently (and sometimes stupidly), under the influence of a secret society which supposedly was there to improve their marriage. Whatever feelings I had about cults was secondary to the brilliance of the writing. It was one of those (rare) books that I wanted to finish to see how Jake and Alice fared, but I also never really wanted the book to end! Strange, but I loved it.

I enjoyed reading this story but I was repelled at the same time. I found it a really strange concept and the violence was shocking given that no crime had been committed. I was pleased at the ending!

I'm sorry but I just couldn't get into this novel. After starting to read it I had to go back because I had assumed that the speaker was a woman. I have to admit that I gave up which is really unusual for me.

An amazing read. Full of twists and turns and intriguing characters. Easily one of the best books of the year,

I'm on the fence with The Marriage Pact.

It is a page turner, I raced through it in two sittings, it is pacy and well written and in many ways completely gripping - but also unlikely to the point of reading inertia and sometimes so over the top silly that that you just sit there shaking your head. I guess maybe because it looks like a psychological thriller (and is I suppose in many ways) but reads more like a random episode of Tales of the Unexpected (showing my age there)

I can't say I didn't enjoy it I thoroughly enjoyed it but more because it gave me plenty of opportunity to growl at the characters for being either stupid or ridiculously passive.

So the story is about a young couple Jake and Alice who marry and then join "The Pact" a strange cult like group determined to keep marriages happy. They have so many rules and regulations that your head will spin, couples are punished for "infractions" in an increasingly bizarre set of "sentences" one of which included Alice walking around everywhere for days (at her law firm where she is supposedly a respected staff member - lets not even START with her signing the contract at the beginning of this book without due diligence, some Lawyer!!!) in a kind of dog collar type thing (still not sure what THAT was all about) and another of which included actual torture. But hey they just pootle along with it and in between all this carry on being, well, slightly annoying and rather insipid. But still - I couldn't stop reading!

It is a different premise, kudos to the author for that, but it really was terribly terribly ridiculous. I know its fiction so it doesn't have to be realistic throughout but everyone in this book was just weird in one way or another. Plus enough with the statistics about marriages Jake - I genuinely don't care.

This might actually have gotten another star from me because as I said I couldn't stop reading it and it was addictive- but then the ending. Sorry to the author but if you are going to drag me along through a progressively ludicrous plot, expect me to give you plenty of suspension of disbelief, then the least you can do is give me the courtesy of a definitive ending. I don't mind ambiguous endings for the most part - some of my favourite books have them because they leave me with thought provoking what if's - but in this case it just doesn't work. Because frankly I don't care that much so I won't think about them again and all it did was make me go oh. That's it? Pfft.

So 3* for great writing, an honestly hugely imaginative premise and for keeping me engaged even though I occasionally wanted to stab people.

Recommended as a marmite read - decide for yourself!

Excellent book. Great storyline and wonderful main characters. I would recommend this book.

While the premise of this thriller was really interesting – a secret organisation that aimed to support others in their marriage and dire consequences if you failed to adhere to the rules – I was massively let down by a major point near the beginning. Alice is a lawyer, and signs a contract without actually reading it. She skims it, and is certainly more aware of the rules than Jake throughout the book, but this kind of impulsive decision seems out of character with her lawyer persona. Now it is stated in-text that she can be impulsive and doesn’t always think through her decisions, but even still. Any other kind of profession might have been more appropriate than having a lawyer impulsively sign a contract which binds her to all sorts of weird and wonderful rules.

But other than that minor quibble, I mostly very much enjoyed this thriller. As Jake and Alice realise how deep they’ve gotten themselves into something they actually know nothing about, and try to extricate themselves, they realise that The Pact is a more sinister organisation than they could have guessed.

What I really liked about this was that obviously as a couple Alice and Jake wanted their marriage to succeed. So the juxtaposition of wanting to get out of The Pact – which aims at making their marriage succeed – and still wanting their marriage to succeed presents some nice misdirection on what their aims are.

Jake himself is something of a nothing character. There’s little that’s distinguishing about him. Alice is the centrepiece of this book. A collection of contradictions, former rocker chick, band frontwoman, but also a junior associate in a commercial law firm, writing briefs for IP cases. She contains multitudes, and Jake doesn’t understand her, but he worships her. Their relationship and the insights given into it is the driving force of this novel, as they forge their first year of marriage and navigate the path The Pact has drawn for them.

Some twists at the end that I didn’t see coming, and one that I did, meant that the ending of this book was something I found very satisfying in its very ambiguity. The first book I’ve read from Michelle Richmond, I would be surprised if it was the last.

Absolutely loved this page turner! Great gripping story that was uncomfortable to read in some places but intriguing at the same time! Couldn't wait to get to the conclusion!