All the Beautiful Lies by Peter Swanson

Days before his college graduation, Harry’s stepmother Alice calls to tell him that his father is dead and the police think it’s suicide. Shortly after he arrives back in Maine for his father’s funeral, Harry meets a mysterious young woman named Grace. Though she claims to be new to the area, Harry begins to suspect that Grace may not be a complete stranger to his family – especially since he saw her at his father’s funeral.

Alice is also acting strangely – she’s convinced her husband’s death wasn’t an accident, and clings to Harry in a romantic and sexual way.

Mesmerized by these two women, Harry finds himself falling deeper under their spell. Yet the closer he gets to them, the more isolated he feels, disoriented by a growing fear that both women are hiding dangerous—even deadly—secrets . . . and that neither one is telling the truth.

When I heard that Peter Swanson was coming out with a new book, I was beyond excited! I’d loved The Kind Worth Killing, and enjoyed Her Every Fear, so I was eager to see what his next book would be like.

All the Beautiful Lies alternates between the past and the present. We see Alice as a child, and how her relationship with her stepfather turns into something twisted and sexual, and we also see how some big events in her past led her to where she is today. In the present, most of the chapters are told through Harry’s point of view, but we see Alice as an adult through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know her darkest secrets.

One thing I loved about this book is how easy it was to read. Once I got into the story, I had a hard time putting the book down, and was constantly trying to get a few pages in so I could figure out what happened. I had a few theories, and some of them were right, but there were still some reveals that I wasn’t expecting. Even though this isn’t an action packed, serial killer thriller, the writing was so good that it drew me in and kept me hooked, which is something I’ve come to expect from Swanson.

I think the “then” and “now” chapters worked well to show how events in their past can shape someone’s present self and draw correlations in their personality traits, however it did take me a little bit to get in the flow of the chapters – each chapter was pretty short, so I had to really pay attention to what timeline I was in.

What I did struggle with was the ending and resolution of the book. I wont post spoilers, but what I will say is that it felt a little too unrealistic to me – everything wrapped up too neatly, and I found myself not believing that things would play out the way they did. Again, I don’t want to give away too much, but this next part will contain mild spoilers and a trigger warning. Disbelief seemed to be a common theme across this book for me because a larger part of the story centers around sexual and romantic relationships between an adults and minors, and it was hard for me to belief that it would happen so willingly and play out the way it did. I really don’t want to say more and spoil anything, but therein lies my trigger warning – if you are not okay with reading about sexual relationships between adults and minors, even if they are “consensual”, this will NOT be the book for you. If you’ve read the book and want more of my thoughts, feel free to message me on Goodreads, Twitter, or Instagram!

All in all, I rated the book 3.5 stars because of the issues mentioned above, and rounded up to 4 due to the fact that I couldn’t put it down. I’d like to thank William Morrow, Edelweiss, and Peter Swanson for my copy of the book. It was my pleasure to provide an honest review.