TL; W[on’t]R[read the review]: A pleasant surprise, but that might be the most surprising thing about it. Don’t pick this up if you’re looking for twists galore or staggering reveals. Instead, consider it if you like luxe descriptions and a well-motivated dash of thematic misandry.
Content warnings: sexual assault [rape by deception], violence, gaslighting, murder-by-bludgeoning
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Abigail Baskin never thought she’d fall in love with a millionaire. Then she met Bruce Lamb. But right before the wedding, Abigail has a drunken one-night stand on her bachelorette weekend. She puts the incident—and the sexy guy who wouldn’t give her his real name—out of her mind, and now believes she wants to be with Bruce for the rest of her life. Then the mysterious stranger suddenly appears—and Abigail’s future life and happiness are turned upside down. He insists that their passionate night was the beginning of something special and he’s tracked her down to prove it. Does she tell Bruce and ruin their idyllic honeymoon—and possibly their marriage? Or should she handle this psychopathic stalker on her own? To make the situation worse, strange things begin to happen. She sees a terrified woman in the night shadows, and no one at the resort seems to believe anything is amiss… including her perfect new husband.
I went into this book fully expecting to DNF it within the first 20 pages. I am a sucker for a certain type of hyped thriller (well, at least I have been for the past year, when I rediscovered thrillers…so I guess I’m relatively new to this sucker-dom), but I have high standards and low expectations for what I’ll actually get in any given thriller. PARTICULARLY a thriller written by a white cis dude. (I try to read as few books written by white cis dudes and women as possible lately, to make up for years of high school, college, grad school, and postgrad of reading mostly just that. Also to compensate for living in a racist, heteropatriarchal, cis-centric society. My reading experiences have been so much less problematic and so much more joyful since I made that shift, let me tell you. My god.) Basically, I expected this book to be sexist and racist as hell.
But then, I was pleasantly surprised (at least on the sexism front…I’ll talk about the way the book handles–or fails to handle–race further below). By the end, I was DELIGHTED. It’s hard to talk about this book (or any thriller, or–for me, apparently–any book at all) without getting into spoilers, but I’ll try briefly before I delve deeper into spoiler territory.
First, I begrudgingly realized about two chapters in that I really clicked with Swanson’s writing style (at least in this novel), and I already mostly liked Abigail as a character. Or at least I could imagine putting up with her for the short length that this novel lasts.
(Did I mention it’s a SHORT thriller? This is a huge plus in my book. More thrillers [ALL thrillers?] should be short like this. Publishers, please adjust accordingly.)
Second, and this is very much just a my taste thing, but the first half of this book was very FUN. Even before the plot engine fully kicks in and it goes full-tilt thriller, I enjoyed learning about Abigail’s backstory, her family’s slightly depressing (but not too depressing) history running a small town theater, her opulent wedding, and the absolute bonkers lux-ness of her techbro husband’s secret honeymoon retreat. (Much more on the techbro husband in the spoiler section.) Maybe it was the year-plus of COVID near-quarantine when I read this, but detailed descriptions of luxurious hotel suites, cocktails, and 5-star multi-course meals was the kind of worldbuilding I could get behind. Some probably found it slow, and fair enough to them, but I really didn’t.
And once the plot fully kicked in, this thing moved. Was it the most innovative or surprising narrative ever? God, no. Could I guess the first major twist almost from the beginning? Yes. Was this a really solid mystery with a satisfying payoff? Hell no, but it didn’t matter. It was a fairly barebones structure with some random details thrown in for padding, but IT DIDN’T MATTER. The thrill comes in the reveal, and in the fact that this book didn’t wallow in punishing women or a sexist ‘she had it coming’ mentality. Which leads me inevitably to the ending, and:
SPOILER TERRITORY
The premise of the final set of twists in the novel is basically, ‘yes all (cis) men.’ (I’ll grant an exception for Abigail’s father, who remains a solid guy, but that’s about it.) For the first half of the novel, and in the synopsis, we’re led to believe that the real threat to Abigail is the mysterious man she slept with during her bachelorette party, who’s now stalking her first at her wedding and now on her honeymoon at a remote island retreat. This is obviously not the whole story, since it’s in the synopsis, but the guy does seem disturbing enough. However, as creepy things start to happen on the island and Abigail learns that the only other woman guest (also on her honeymoon) ALSO encountered a former sexual partner on the island, things start to shift. Were these things that most readers could have seen coming? Yes. But the way the novel handles these twists makes them worthwhile, I think.
Soon, Abigail witnesses the other woman bleeding and hiding outside her luxury cabin in the middle of the night, though the woman disappears when Abigail pursues. When she reports this incident, everyone assures her they’ll look into it, but then she learns that the woman has supposedly already left the island and couldn’t have been running through the night. Abigail starts to distrust the numerous servants and the lux retreat’s very chad-like founder (way too late in the game, if you ask me), and the only woman staff member furtively warns her not to even trust her own husband. Finally, she’s catching up to where I’d bet a lot of readers (at least this reader) already were for quite a few chapters. During a confrontation with stalker-dude, Abigail learns that he’s actually an actor who was paid by a mysterious source to try to sleep with her at her bachelorette party. Credit where credit’s due here: Abigail IMMEDIATELY redefines their earlier sexual encounter as rape (since it was), is horrified, and balks at interacting with stalker-dude further. My bar is low, but I loved that the narrative never undercut or sneered at the fact that sex under fraudulent pretexts is rape.
For the sake of the plot, though, Abigail realizes she’s between a rock and a hard place with her husband (who baited her into cheating on him) and stalker-dude, so she allies with stalker-dude, who has at least (ostensibly) come clean to her. After a bit more wheel-spinning and some discoveries that didn’t have the payoff I’d hoped for (Silvanus/pagan cult iconography, a wooden Wicker-Man style cage at a derelict camp on the other side of the island), Abigail thinks she’s about to escape the island via plane unharmed, but then ALL OF THE MEN (stalker-dude, Bruce the techbro husband, the chadbro retreat owner, even the goddamn PLANE PILOT) start laughing and reveal they’re all in cahoots to “punish” cheating wives. [Shudder]
A few of the men get their incel-style rocks off by punching Abigail, subduing her, and injecting her with a sedative, and then the narrative cuts to her and the other woman, tied up, awaiting death at the hands of an MRA-forest-cult all masked up around a bonfire.
BUT, there’s another twist. These shitty men don’t actually want to KILL these women, they just want to pretend to, by using stage knives. HAHA, see…it’s ok because they only wanted to terrorize and physically assault these women, not murder then. (!!)
BUT THEN, there’s a FINAL (??) twist. The husband of the other woman actually DOES want to kill his wife, because he’s taken all of this deeply toxic shit fully on board, and he beats her to death with a rock. Oopsies! The other men freak out (…), and Abigail numbly (and druggedly) walks away back into the woods. I very much appreciated this twist, since it realistically showed how misogyny escalates and also how, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut that every goddamn troll should take to heart, “we are what we pretend to be.”
Abigail spends the next 24 hours hiding from the entire island as well as a fleet of outside men (with guns! And dogs!) who’ve been flown in to track her down (presumably to kill her, now that’s she’s a witness to them all being accessories to murder, and not just perpetrators of beatings and torture). Then comes my FAVORITE moment in the book. She’s been hiding in a closet in her own cabin, and when her husband Bruce goes to sleep there, she contemplates killing him outright. She doesn’t at first, though, as she thinks it won’t really help her current situation. However, once she decides to flee to the boathouse to find a kayak to escape the island, Bruce wakes up and tries to attack her. Here, finally, she DOES kill him, and she feels very little remorse.
I got strong Ready or Not vibes here (which is a fucking fabulous film), and I loved it. Before escaping, she also shoves a kayak down a cliff onto stalker-dude AND shoots him in the kneecap when he tries to gaslight her again, all truly smart decisions.
(For the animal lovers, note that the tracking dogs pursuing her turn out to be very sweet and are never injured.)
Abigail kayaks to the mainland, temporarily holds an old beachcombing man hostage, and gets taken into police custody. She tells her story, they round up the MRA cult, cut to epilogue. I was totally expecting the cops to be in cahoots with the very wealthy techbros, so before the epilogue I thought Abigail was fucked (though not 100%, since I know how this kind of thriller works). I am glad that patriarchy didn’t win out, even if it was a bit unrealistic.
However, having the cops save the day is a tired trope and also functions as really toxic copaganda, and here’s where my critique comes back into play: Abigail’s rescue is mostly taken for granted, but it’s really her massive white (and pretty) privilege that saves the day. The epilogue mentions a host of interrogations and meetings with attorneys and therapists, but never once do we think that her account is in doubt by the powers that be. So a woman who held an old white man hostage with a rifle, killed her husband, and shot another dude is believed over all the rich MRA techbros and their lawyers. Okay. This is simultaneously impossible to believe because of her gender and incredibly realistic due to her race. Once again, default whiteness trumps all.
(As an aside, the ONLY character who is noted as non-white is the other woman at the retreat’s ex-lover, a rich man from Barbados who seems incredibly nice but turns out to be as terrible as all the other men. He escapes the fallout from Abigail’s hunt and remains unharmed, which seems fair enough, all things considered. And I’m NOT saying that I wish Swanson, a white dude, had written a POC pov character into this novel, by any means. I’m just saying that the book doesn’t interrogate its blinding whiteness in any meaningful or interesting way, which is a shame and a big hole in a book that does interrogate gender and fundamentally focuses on the inherent threat of the setting’s all-male group.)
Copaganda rating: Medium, considering that the cops help Abigail unconditionally after she rescues herself; they only play a role very briefly at the end, though.