Marriage, Money, and Mayhem in The Retirement Plan by Sue Hincenbergs

Read time: 4 minutes

🎧 Listened in audio
📢 Narrated by Kiiri Sandy and John Pirhalla
⏱ Duration: 11 hours
🏷️ Published by Harper Collins & William Morrow, April 29, 2025
🎭 Genre: Mystery

Book Blurb:

Three lifelong friends decide that if life won’t hand them a retirement windfall, they’ll make one themselves, by cashing in on their husbands’ life insurance policies. What they don’t know is that their husbands are running their own secret money scheme. When both plans collide, nobody’s sure who’s double-crossing whom in this sharp, darkly comic debut about marriage, money, and midlife mayhem.

Let’s talk … ‘maybe’ murder!

This story sets you up for a middle-aged chaos wrapped in marital discontent. The opening leans heavily into humor and relatable frustration: decades long marriages, bad money choices, and the kind of “we love them, but also maybe want to kill them” energy only friendship and resentment can brew. Kiiri Sandy and John Pirhalla gave the wives and husbands such distinct energy that kept track of all the characters almost effortlessly.

And then the tone shifted. About halfway through, the book takes a turn that’s noticeably darker, and I found myself recaliberating. Is this cozy? A thriller? A crime caper? The answer seems to be all three, and while that’s an ambitious swing, it doesn’t always land cleanly. The tonal unevenness threw me off more than once, and there are quietly devastating, emotional threads woven into these marriages that deserved more room to breathe than they got. Some of them simply drift away unresolved, which, depending on your reading style, will either feel like intentional ambiguity, or an unsatisfying loose end. The moral ambiguity of every single character made me question the choices made in the second half of the book so intently, I forgot I was doing laundry while listening to the audiobook.

The ending is where I found myself most conflicted. It’s tidy, perhaps too tidy, and while I could follow the logic of how things wrapped up, I wasn’t entirely convinced. It felt more like a conclusion the story needed rather than one it fully earned. I couldn’t sympathize or empathize with a single character in the book, and couldn’t, for the life of me, align with how any of their character arcs ended. It’s messy, maybe intentionally so, but maybe that’s the point that marriages, money, and midlife regrets are never tidy.

Would I recommend it?

This one is tricky. You would either love or hate the book. Go in expecting a darkly absurd ride, not a cozy mystery. It’s uneven, and brings out very strong emotions, and a few loose threads leaving you more puzzled than satisfied by the final page. From my side, I wouldn’t root for any of the characters in the book, so there!

Instead, maybe try these!

• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson — Darkly funny, ensemble chaos, morally grey characters — a natural companion read.
  Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• The Maid by Nita Prose — For readers who want quirky characters, an oddball cast, and a mystery with warmth underneath the mayhem.
  Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala — If the dark humour mixed with cozy vibes is your sweet spot, this series delivers that balance far more consistently.
  Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• The Appeal by Janice Hallett – dark humor and moral ambiguity told through clever structure.
  Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman — If you loved the older protagonists taking matters into their own hands, try, not the first, but the second book in The Thursday Murder Club series.
  Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
• Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman – for readers who like messy relationships with heart.
  Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
  

Sipping Schemes or Spilling Secrets, What Would You Do?

The wives in this book hatched their plan over friendship and financial desperation. But here’s what I keep thinking about: the secrets, the medical diagnosis kept for years, the resentment that built because of it, the retirement dreams that crumbled because no one said the quiet parts out loud. So tell me: do you think couples actually keep secrets this big from each other? And could a long marriage survive all of this? Drop your take in the comments. I genuinely need to debrief with someone.

Book Links:

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