I Just Read About That…

[LISTENED TO: June 2023] All the Beautiful Lies

I loved Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders.  I hated the characters in The Kind Worth Killing (but I loved the twists).  So I had this third book as a kind of final litmus test for if I would listen to anymore books by him.

And the answer is no.

Once again, Swanson’s twist and surprises (and the ending) are really good.  But if possible, he made main characters who are even more horrible and unlikable.  How was that possible?

There’s a few spoilers in this review, although none that reveal the twists or who the murderer(s) is/are.

I’m just going to get this over with, so yes, there’s a spoiler here.  One of the main characters is a pedophile.

It’s bad enough when, at some point in the middle of the book, we learn that he is happily going to essentially make a new life with the daughter of his second wife (step-daughter, so not incest, but Jesus Fucking Christ).  And then we find out that this guy was introduced to sex when he was a teenager by a bored housewife.  So he is basically “paying it forward.”

How did Swanson even write these words?   How did his moral compass allow these words to pass his fingers onto the page?

I mean, the blurb on Goodreads starts with this:

Harry Ackerson has always considered his stepmother Alice to be sexy and beautiful, in an “otherworldly” way. She has always been kind and attentive, if a little aloof in the last few years.

I mean, who reads that blurb and wants to read more (I go into my books totally blind, so I had no idea this was coming).

And did he feel that having a long slow introduction to the characters might somehow make it less horrifying when he revealed this guy?

So, this story begins with Harry learning  that his father has died.  He fell off a cliff wall of some kind–the site of his regular walks.

By the way, this story, like the previous one is set in Kennewick, Maine.  I couldn’t tell if there was supposed to be some kind of connection between the two stories–a few of the same locations are mentioned.  But really, how much murder can one small seaside town absorb?

So, Harry’s father is a used bookseller (just like the main character in Eight Perfect Murders, perhaps Swanson needs to branch out?).  He lived in New York until Harry went to college then he moved to Maine where he opened up a second branch of his used book stores.  Harry’s father’s wife (Harry’s mother) died when Harry was young.  So when Harry’s father started dating Alice (the real estate agent in Maine), Harry was fine with it.

Harry had been living at college for most of these years, so he didn’t really know Alice very well.  She was younger than his father but older than him.  And as the blurb says, Harry had a strange attraction to her.  So that when he stay with her after his father dies, her behavior is peculiar.

This book is also broken up into section like the other book.  But this one is broken into then and now.

The audiobook only has one reader, Sarah Mollo-Christensen, who I absolutely loved.  Her range was exceptional and I found her men to be so convincingly male that I forgot it was one narrator. 

In Alice’s past we find that she never knew her father and had grown up with her mother in rural Maine.  Her mother won some money in a lawsuit settlement that allowed them to move to Kennewick.  While there, her mother met a man named Jake who was a well off banker.  Alice’s mother’s moved improved greatly after they were married.

But soon enough she resumed her drinking and actually seemed to be worse than before.

One night, she came home from a party (which she left early because she had no real friends) and found her mother choking on her own vomit.  Alice didn’t do anything to help her.  And when she looked up she saw that Jake was watching her do nothing about it.

And soon enough Jake and Alice were together (she was still in high school).

A few years later, Alice’s only real friend dies mysteriously and the friend’s mother is certain that Alice had something to do with it.

We have seen the story from Alice’s point of view so we know the truth.  And it is Alice’s dispassionate way that she describes the deaths of both of these people that make Alice such a weird character.

As with the previous book, I found the narrator’s utter deadpan and almost bland narration of these psychopathic characters to be at once very dull but also very compelling.  Strange.

By the way, this book has gone almost half way through before anything like a plot is revealed.  We learn a  lot about their pasts and we see that Harry’s father is dead, but there is nothing even remotely presented as a mystery or a story for at least a third of the book.  It’s not boring exactly but it’s shocking how little actually happens in the first third of the book.

Back to Harry.  Harry is surprised that his father would have fallen off this cliff wall because he walked it every day.  And soon after he arrives, the local police say that it looks like his father’s head was smashed in by a blunt instrument before he fell.  So it was likely a murder.

At the funeral he sees a woman (Grace) who doesn’t speak to him.  He tries to find out who she is and she admits after some time that she was having an affair with Harry’s father.

Meanwhile, Alice has revealed to the police that Harry’s father was having an affair with a woman in the Maine store.  And that they are prime suspects.

So now Harry (who, honestly isn’t very bright for a recent college grad) thinks his father was having affairs all over the place.

Grace and Harry wind up talking some and she reveals the truth about her affair with his father.  He’s not sure how he feels about it (Harry’s also not a very interesting person).

By the way, it’s at this point that every woman’s physical assets have been described with exacting detail about their desirability.  So Grace is pretty hot and, of course, Harry is kind of like his dad so she’s into him too.

And then, since I’ve already spoiled some of the book, I’ll just spoil a little more.  Grace is murdered.  And that really sucks because Grace was the most interesting character in the book, with an actual passion, which no one else seemed to have.

But fear not, because Grace’s twin sister is ready to meet up with Harry and possibly fall for him too.

Now, I have to say that the big reveal is a good surprise and one I was not expecting.  And once again, the very end of the book has another surprise in store.  And once Swanson gets into the heart of the mystery, his books are really interesting, but WHY?  WHY all the pedophilia?  And why is the pedophile not punished in a meaningful way?  And why does everyone feel the need to marry the people when they want to sleep with their children?

What is going on in Swanson’s head?

Also, everyone is all of Swanson’s books drinks like an unabashed alcoholic.  And his specifics about the kind of booze people drink is a little too intense for my liking.  But that’s just a minor quibble.

Anyhow, I just can’t handle anymore of Swanson’s psychopathic characters.  But I’d love some more of his good twists and surprises.