This had potential to be good but was truly just a lot of step parents sleeping with their step children and adults seducing 16/17 year olds. I understand what Swanson was trying to do in showing that once a minor is taken advantage of by an adult, the minor often follows that pattern into adulthood as well but this storyline felt like a jumbled mess.

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! 

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. 

I think it was the characters in this book that influenced my rating, I just couldn’t warm or relate to any of them. The plot was good, but not quite as good as other books I have read by this author

3.5
Harry is heartbroken at the death of his father Bill and has come home to help his step mother, Alice, with the funeral and figure out what to do with his dad’s bookstore. While at his dad’s bookstore he bumps into a mysterious young woman who piques his interest and makes him begin to question some of the things he has been told. He also is hyperaware that Alice, who has always been attractive to him, has been a bit more forward in recent months, setting off some additional questions and feelings. The parallel story is composed of flashbacks from Alice’s childhood and the peculiar relationships she had before she met Bill. The nature of some of the relationships made me feel a bit uncomfy, but the characters were definitely captivating in their own way. Readers will definitely have an idea of what happened to Bill on that fateful walk, but the twists still caught my by surprise and made it difficult to figure out the end game. An easy, finish in one sitting, rainy night, suspense roller coaster perfect with a cup of cocoa.

I loved Swanson's previous work. He tells a meticulously plotted, suspenseful and sleek thriller with dynamic characters whose motives you never understand until you're smacked with the shocking twist at the end. When all is revealed, you think on what you just read - going back chapters to make sense of it all and reveling in the shock of what just happened.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel the same way at the end of "All the Beautiful Lies." Simply put, the characters are boring, and by the end, I didn't care what happened to any of them - they were all so one-dimensional. In an attempt to tell a story about the affects of pedophilia, statutory rape, and sexual abuse, the reader just wants it to end because the adult characters are deplorable and the youth characters affected don't carry any appeal each other. Especially since the story moves between past and present, and every character seems to have horrible motives or intentions.

Even Harry, who I guess is supposed to be the "hero", doesn't have many redeeming qualities. You're supposed to feel bad for him, his father just died, but you just wan't him to grow a backbone and do something more than walk around town and kiss random strangers somehow associated to his father's death. He's a college graduate, but he's pretty stupid and lacks any knowledge of how the world works.

Swanson is also known for his shocking twists, and the twist in this one is pretty dang predictable and falls flat. Once revealed, the reader can almost predict how things go down...and you'll find you don't really care. With secondary characters introduced late in the game, you almost wonder if there will be two or three more twists that you won't care about...but you almost want there to be more twists to somehow redeem the novel.

In order to maintain the mystery and tell the compelling story, Swanson will utilize different narrative voices and/or time jumps to draw you in. This approach doesn't work in "All the Beautiful Lies." It ends up being clunky and congested. The finesse and restraint he's exhibited in previous works isn't present in this one. It ends up being a lot of build up with little pay off, and distractions and diversions that don't have any larger pay off.