“Watching, Pam sensed something shift in the night air. As she cleared the dishes, she looked around the table at her husband and the friends they’d made three decades ago, and wondered again, which of them would die first.
“Two days later, she knew.”
Pam, Nancy, Shalisa, Marlene – four best friends in Sue Hincenbergs’ The Retirement Plan looking forward to a comfortable later life, until their idiot husbands pool their life savings in a disastrous investment and lose it all. To say they are disappointed would be an understatement – and then they discover the life insurance policies each man has taken out, and a new retirement plan is born. This one involves a hit man.
Hank, Larry, Andre, Dave – the idiot husbands, except what the wives don’t know is that they have their own retirement plan, and it involves the casino where two of them work. It’s ingenious, dangerous, and could get them all killed. In fact, they’re beginning to worry that the new owners of the casino, a crime syndicate out of India, may be intending to do just that.
Throw into that mix Hector, a barber from El Salvador known for “doing what needs doing;” Padma, the new young boss of the casino, desperate to get out from under the shadow of her crime queen mother; and Farid, the man her mother sends to examine the books; and you have the recipe for one of the most surprising, twist-filled, suspenseful, heartfelt, and laugh-out-loud novels of the year: so many rugs being pulled out from under so many feet – including the readers’.
“We can’t just Lucy and Ethel our way through this,” Nancy warns. “We have to be prepared.”
But Lucy and Ethel never faced anything like this.
“The idea came from two experiences,” says the author. “First … in your thirties it seems everyone wants to know when you’re getting married or having kids. But when you get older the question changes. I was shocked the first time I was asked ‘when are you retiring?’ My first thought was: how old do you think I am? Then I realized they were also asking – how’s your bank account, and how’s your career? That made me think about the people who get to that stage of their lives and realize things haven’t worked out like they’d hoped – they don’t have the partner they’d dreamed of or the money they’ll need. They’re out of runway, so other than winning the lottery, how else can they turn things around?
“The Retirement Plan is the story of how a few couples faced those problems, although admittedly, both the husbands and wives in this novel were ‘outside the box’ thinkers.
“The second experience is, much like the characters in the novel, my husband and I made great friends when our boys were little and in sports. The kids are grown now but those friendships have endured. One night not long before I started writing this, the other three couples were over for dinner. I looked around my kitchen table and remembered how sad it was when my parents’ friends started passing away. In that moment I appreciated what we have, but I also saw how quickly this time of our lives could be over. I thought to myself, which of us will die first? And basically, that’s the first line of the book.
“From there I had to figure out what husbands could do that was so bad it could justify a wife wanting to kill them. Surprisingly, (and maybe luckily) that was harder than I thought.”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Sue Hincenbergs, go here.
