Review: The Marriage Contract by Katee Robert

In the Marriage Contract, we go into the world of the Irish mafia in Boston where we meet the O’Malley family of siblings. The focus of this book is the second oldest O’Malley, Teague, and his arranged marriage to the heir of a rival family, Callie.

Teague and Callie have their engagement announced just as conflict between their two families and the third family in power boils over. They strive to avoid the conflict while also getting to know each other and discover that their arranged marriage could actually be a love match.

For the most part, this is a well written book. The characters are well developed and they are easy to relate to and root for. There is a great balance between relationship storytelling, both family and romantic, and the suspense elements. I liked the book and my first instinct was to give it a 3.5 to 4 cocktail review.

Unfortunately, there were a couple of places within the book where things were just slightly awkward and didn’t flow nearly as well. Most of them were smaller, but still required me to go back and reread a passage several times to feel like I understood where it was going. One particular example occurred during an intimate moment between Teague and Callie; things were moving along well and progressed naturally, but somehow clothing magically disappeared. In the grand scheme of things, these were small issues, but they were distracting from the story and made it harder to enjoy.

The Marriage Contract is the first book in a new series and this is a new author for me. Even though this particular book had a few issues, I am still curious about how the O’Malley story continues in the next book, The Marriage Pact.