BY SYDNEY SCOTT Your name is Addie Downs, you live in your parents’ house in Pleasant Ridge, Illinois, where your days are spent taking care of your troubled brother and your nights are spent looking for Mr. Right on the Internet. It’s the night of your high school reunion and you’ve decided not to relive those horrible moments with people you have no interest in seeing again, specifically your former best friend. But, your planned night-long Food Network marathon is cut short when your former best bud shows up on your doorstep claiming to have killed someone. Thus begins Jennifer Weiner’s new book Best Friends Forever. Addie Downs faces down the dilemma of helping a former friend or turning her back on someone she used to consider a sister. What ensues is a cross country trip, various flashbacks, and a homicide investigation. While Best Friends Forever is hardly in danger of winning the National Books Critics Circle Award, it is a highly satisfying addition to Weiner’s chick lit franchise. In the wake of In Her Shoes and Good In Bed, Weiner has proven herself the mistress of chick-lit-turned-chick-flicks. The book is a good, light read, perfect for a lazy Sunday or the obligatory day at the beach. However, like other books in the chick lit genre it has some irritating elements, not the least of which is a storyline that seems ripped from the script of a bad soap opera and the fact that Valerie, Addie’s former bff-turned-would-be-murderess, is pretty annoying. In the end everything ends happily and the characters have grown in some significant way leaving the reader satisfied that Weiner has left the fictional world a better place than she found it. If you have time to spare and don’t want to stress you brain, then I’d advise you to pick up Best Friends Forever because it’s never too late to learn what to do when your best friend kills somebody.