Book Review: Every Vow You Break

A newly wed couple's honeymoon quickly spirals into dark and deadly in Peter Swanson's Every Vow You Break. As Abigail Baskin, who is engaged to millionaire Bruce Lamb, sweats over the details to have the wedding of her dreams, she is wracked by guilt over having a drunken one-night stand with a handsome stranger she met at a bar during her bachelorette party weekend. Try as much to put the incident behind her and move on, she gets the shock of her life when the man, only known to her as Scottie, shows up unannounced at a technology-free remote luxury resort in Maine, imploring her to leave Bruce and spend the rest of their lives together, sending her plans for a idyllic honeymoon into a tailspin and setting in motion a series of nightmarish happenings that makes her confront her new husband in fresh light. Constructed along the lines of the 2019 horror film Ready or Not, Swanson's latest outing has all the hallmarks of a cracking, intriguing read, but its unsettling backdrop and methodic drip-feeding of chills quickly goes off the rails in the second act, resolving later into a familiar and an outrageously unearned ending. Although the whip-crack pacing makes for compulsive reading, Every Vow You Break is a miss. There's hardly a moment that's credible, but the book's true crime is that there's hardly a moment in it that's truly enjoyable either.