In her debut novel, Jennifer Sturman takes two popular genres – Chick Lit and Romantic Suspense – and combines them into a Sex and the City style mystery. While this idea certainly holds intrigue, the plotting is simply not tight enough for this story to completely succeed.

Narrator Rachel Benjamin is a New York investment banker who has come to the Adirondacks for the wedding of Emma Furlong, her best friend from Harvard. Unfortunately, Emma is marrying Richard, a disgusting worm of a human being hated by Rachel and all of her friends. Rachel tries to be supportive of Emma, but she feels no joy in the prospect of Emma marrying Richard. She is intrigued by Peter, Richard’s best man, but that is about the most joyful item on her immediate horizon as she prepares to endure Emma’s disaster of a wedding.

On the morning of the wedding, Richard is found dead, a fact that seems to relieve Rachel and, apparently, most of the guests. It’s also obvious, however, that someone at the Furlong house killed him. Rachel wonders if a pact made by her group of friends at Harvard – one in which they vowed to keep one another from bad relationships by whatever means necessary – is what led to the killing.

Though the story is told from Rachel’s point of view, I found it very difficult to get inside her head and feel as though I knew her. Occasionally, such as when Rachel describes her distaste for her boss and his Old Boy Network pals, she flickers to life, but for most of the time Rachel seems to be repeating a flat narrative. In order to be effective, the author really needed to put more of Rachel herself into the story she tells. When she discusses her job and her attraction to Richard’s best man Peter, this starts to happen, but Rachel’s description of the murder and subsequent investigation are oddly devoid of emotion much of the time.

Rachel and her friends do exchange funny one-liners at various points throughout the story. However, with the exception of Emma, most of Rachel’s circle of friends appear as stereotypes rather than real, fleshed-out characters. Peter and Matthew, the main male characters in this tale, fare somewhat better, but Rachel’s female friends are the All-American Girl, the Complete Sexpot, and the Brainy Gay Lawyer. They all play true to type and help move the story along, but they also add to the story’s lack of dimensionality. The women talk about the killing, their college memories, and even the pact on occasion, but they are so distanced from the reader that none of it seems to draw together and have much significance.

The actual mystery at the heart of the novel is an interesting puzzle. The solution is not immediately obvious, and I did have a good time trying to puzzle out who killed Richard and why. In addition, trying to learn more about who Richard really was and what really motivated him made for interesting speculation.

Had Rachel and her friends been more well-drawn, this story could have sparkled. However, the flat characterizations and the author’s habit of telling and explaining rather than simply showing made this book meander a bit too much for me. Sure, there are rich and smart women, a relationship, and a murder, but at the end of the story, none of it really stood out in my mind. There are enough good scenes in here to make me believe that this author has promise, though, and hopefully she will realize it in future books.