All the Beautiful Lies: A Novel - Hardcover

Harry Ackerson has always found his stepmother, Alice, beautiful in an “otherworldly” way. She’s also been a kind and attentive presence in his life, if a little aloof in the last few years. Days before his college graduation, Alice calls with shocking news. His father is dead and the police think it’s suicide. Devastated, he returns to his father’s home in Maine. There, he and Alice help each other pick up the pieces of their lives and vow to uncover what happened to his father.

Shortly after he arrives, Harry meets a mysterious young woman named Grace McGowan. Though she claims to be new to the area, Harry begins to suspect that Grace may not be a complete stranger to his family. But she isn’t the only attractive woman taking an interest in Harry. The sensual Alice is also growing closer, coming on to him in an enticing, clearly 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 is telling the truth about his father. And when someone else turns up dead, Harry realizes he’s in much more danger than he’d ever imagined. 

With dazzling and intriguing points of view, tantalizing and twisty plotting, and some of the cleverest and most manipulative characters to snake their way through a thriller in recent memory, All the Beautiful Lies cements Peter Swanson’s place among today’s most talented masters of suspense.

Peter Swanson is the author of three novels: The Girl With a Clock For a Heart, an LA Times Book Award finalist; The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; and his most recent, Her Every Fear. His books have been translated into 30 languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, and Yankee Magazine. A graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College, he lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with his wife.