Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson Review

Woman meets tech billionaire who immediately proposes. Woman cheats on naive tech billionaire on her hen night - doesn’t tell him. Honeymoon time! On a weird island - something’s up…

If that summary sounds vague, poorly conceived and plain astoopid, then it’s representative of this novel. I’ve only read one other Peter Swanson novel, Rules for Perfect Murders, and it was pretty decent, so I was wholly unprepared for the boring, instantly forgettable rubbish that turned out to be Every Vow You Break.

Stilted characters, contrived scenarios, obvious plot twists, huge stretches of dreariness where nothing happened, bafflingly dumb reveals, a garbage final act worthy of M Night, and an underwhelming finale - this book has it all in spades.

The premise of the protagonist sleeping with some rando on her hen night was so clearly a setup for something more than it was that it wasn’t surprising in the least. And the further “surprise” made all the male characters look like idiot children that it was more amazing that such drivel saw print or that a writer as experienced as Swanson couldn’t come up with anything better and thought this drek would pass muster as convincing motivation.

Beyond the abysmal features of the novel, the absolute worst part was the plodding storytelling. It takes half the novel(!) before anything of note happens - up ‘til then all we see is the premise playing out. Even once things start happening, none of it’s memorable or exciting. If what’s happening comes across as braindead and the characters are uninteresting nobodies - essentially puppets that never convinced you they were real people to even remotely care about - then it’s never going to engage you in the least; and it doesn’t.

Despite this crapfest, I haven’t given up on Swanson - I’m sure some of his earlier books are as decent as Rules for Perfect Murders was. But I still highly recommend steering well clear of Every Vow You Break, which was an utterly dismal reading experience. I take that back - maybe the absolute worst part of the novel is the title which never failed to put that annoying Sting song in my head. What a ghastly concoction this book is!