Now Read This: “Pretty Guilty Women,” by Gina Lamanna

The Banks family spares no expense on extravagant events, and the DeBleu/Banks wedding is no exception. This week-long celebration, arranged by a renowned wedding planner at a luxury spa resort, is set to be the event of the season. But even the perfect wedding can get derailed when a man ends up dead the night before the ceremony and four women confess to his murder.

Gina Lamanna’s “Pretty Guilty Women” cycles through chapters about each of these four women as they prepare to attend this wedding, while showing the twists their lives take once they arrive at the resort. Three of these ladies are the bride’s friends from college, but events from the past have kept these women apart for nearly 20 years. Ginger is a mother of three who just needs a break from the chaos of parenthood. Emily is feeling less-than-elated by her latest fling on the airplane. And Kate was dumped before she could even check into her hotel room. The fourth woman, Lulu, is related to the groom through marriage. She is nervous because her fifth husband might have fallen for another woman.

This unlikely group of women meet up in the resort’s bar on the first night of the festivities and form an unlikely bond by sharing their problems and a bit too much champagne. Over the next few days, problems from the past and present crash into each other as these women deal with drama from their own lives and each other.

I enjoyed reading “Pretty Guilty Women” because of the realistic ways these characters relate to each other and the life-like situations they find themselves in. Lamanna’s writing does a great job of depicting the growth of her characters based on these interactions and comparisons these characters make between themselves and their peers. And although some parts of this book were a bit predictable, it was a good read overall.

If you are interested in other books like this, you might try Elin Hilderbrand’s “The Perfect Couple,” a book about a murder investigation in which members of a wedding party are the prime suspects.