Have you read Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson and are looking for spoilers? Want to discuss the ending of the book? Need a plot summary? You are in the right place. Here’s my Spoilers and Discussion Post for Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson!
Table of Contents for This Post:
Plot Summary for Every Vow You Break
The Ending of Every Vow You Break
Spoiler Discussion
Book Club Questions for Every Vow You Break
Plot Summary of Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson
Right her before her wedding, Madeleine spots a guy she’s met before. She nervously avoids him, then gets an email from him asking her to call her wedding off and meet up with him. She emails back and says no.
Abigail is at her bachelorette party and meets a guy. They discuss her fiancé, Bruce. Abigail met Bruce in a NY coffee shop and told him about her parents’ financial troubles. He offered to pay her student loans and says he fell in love with her at first sight. Before long, they are engaged.
Abigail and the guy she just met (guy #2) agree to use made up names: hers is Madeleine and his is Scottie. She decides to have one last fling with Scottie before marrying Bruce.
Just to review: “Madeleine” is actually Abigail and her hook-up is “Scottie.” But Abigail is marrying Bruce.
Abigail and Bruce get married. He planned the surprise honeymoon, which is on an island off Maine. It has luxury accommodations but no cell service or internet. Bruce is an investor in the resort.
When “Scottie” shows up on the island, Abigail is horrified. She finds tells him he was just a fling and asks him to leave her alone. He says they had a connection and he’ll prove it to her- she has to sleep with him one more time.
A panicked Abigail uses the resort emergency phone to call her best friend Zoe and ask her to research “Scottie.”
Another woman honeymooning on the island, Jill, tells Abigail she also just ran into a man she had a fling with.
Zoe finds out Scottie’s name is really Eric and that his wife, Madeleine, drowned in their honeymoon.
Well, that is a bit weird.
Abigail tries to salvage the situation by telling Bruce she finds Eric creepy. She adds that thinks she saw him at her bachelorette party. Maybe he’s stalking her.
Abigail goes to meet Jill, but Jill doesn’t show up. Late that night, Abigail spots Jill, bleeding and hiding in the bushes outside her room. Horrfied, she insists that Bruce call for help, but the resort says that she must be mistaken: Jill and her husband have already left the island.
Abigail tells Bruce she wants to search the island for Jill and then leave. She runs into Eric who says he also saw Jill last night.
Bruce tells her they can’t get a flight out until the next morning and they argue.
Spoilers for the ending of Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson
Abigail runs into Eric, who confides that Bruce paid him to meet Abigail at the bachelorette party and tempt her into cheating. Eric apologizes for this.
Abigail is freaked out and tells the resort she wants to leave immediately. The resort arranges a plane for her. Eric says he’s coming with on the plane with her (and Bruce) to protect Abigail. Eric claims Jill was thrown out of the plane when she was trying to flee the island.
What??
It turns out that all the guys are in this together. Abigail is drugged and wakes up next to Jill. Abigail tells Jill she thinks the guys are all playing a game and will kill them.
The men drug the two women again and set up a mock trial for them.
Things get out of hand and Alex kills Jill with a rock. The other men seem horrified by this and, in the confusion, Abigail runs. She finds some food and hides in the closet of her cabin at the resort.
Bruce comes back to the room and she waits until he falls asleep, then stabs him. She steals a kayak and a gun and tries to escape but Eric finds her. She shoots him and gets the kayak in the water. After paddling all night, she finally reaches shore, where she calls 911.
The Ending of Every Vow You Break Explained
The men were part of some sort of fidelity cult that lured cheating women to the island to punish them and …. yeah, this was a weird one for me.
I mean, I don’t believe in cheating, but proposing to someone you just met, then hiring someone to try to trap them into cheating, then going ahead with the wedding so you can then punish and kill them is … weird. And way too much work. It’s like ten wrongs don’t make a right. Or something to that effect.
Spoiler Discussion for Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson
Abigail was a great character and I liked her. Yes, she had a whirlwind romance, got engaged, cheated on her fiancé, and then decided to get married. Hey, no one is perfect!
I thought this book would be focused on the stalker trying to ruin Abigail’s life, but I was completely wrong.
I was glad that the book had some surprises up its sleeve, and I thought the twist that Bruce had hired Eric to test Abigail’s loyalty was interesting.
But where the book lost me was the whole “fidelity cult,” which seemed really out-there to me. I did notice the absence of women on the island right away, and I wonder if other female readers did too.
Book Club Discussion Questions for Every Vow You Break
Does your book club need some kick-off discussion questions? Here are some suggestions. Feel free to add more in the comments!
- Discuss the themes of marriage, vows, and fidelity in the story.
- Discuss the role that gender stereotypes play in the book. How do the characters reinforce or break out of traditional stereotypes?
- What part does the book’s setting play in the story?
- How /where does Every Vow You Break fit into the thriller genre? Is it a modern gothic? A domestic thriller? How does it fit into/ the new subgenre of female-centric/feminist domestic thrillers that have become more popular in the last ten years?
- In their review, The New York Times points out that Every Vow You Break has parallels to fantasy-horror books like Rosemary’s Baby, a 1968 book that some have argued reflected cultural anxieties of the time over feminism and women’s rights. Do you think the horror elements in Every Vow You Break reflect any cultural anxieties of our time?
What did you think of Every Vow You Break? Talk to me in comments!
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What’s the Best Book by Peter Swanson?
I read them, crunched the Goodreads numbers, and asked you. Here’s the conclusion:
Want to see my post on Mysteries and Thrillers Set on an Island? Check it out!
I have to say that I thought Abigail was never in love with Bruce and her insecurity from her parents caused her to marry a guy she barely knew. I mean that whole long speech he gave her about spending their lives together was creepy. Just like checkov’s gun, I loved knowing she’d use the knife and rifle. Those guys were horrible.
Agree with all of it. I think the whole plot sort of depended on the weird rushed marriage and the weird honeymoon. And the weird groom!
I guessed the end after I saw it on Book Bub but looked for a spoiler synopsis to verify. The only thing I got wrong, or missed, was that it was a cult.
Hi Sam! Glad to be of help. I loved the whole “married someone I barely knew and was whisked off to a remote honeymoon” as it was giving me all the gothic romance vibes. But the whole bitter men cult was pretty out-there. So I don’t think you missed anything, just that it was pretty impossible to guess something that strange.
Hi Jen, I’m one of those who appreciates spoilers when I look for them; in this case the synopsis gave enough info to figure the two guys were in league, that there was a club for them isn’t that far fetched, lol. Guess my mind has a very fertile imagination or a dim view of reality. Still lol.
haha I often predict wacky twists that don’t happen. Maybe we should write thrillers!
👍
Thank you for writing spoilers for this book so that I didn’t need to finish it. I was disturbed to find I was reading a misogynistic revenge porn fantasy. This is my first book by this author. I have read it’s a departure from his regular style, but I am curious about how he writes women characters in his other books.
I was also a bit surprised about that whole turn of events. I could have accepted that her husband was a weirdo misogynist but a whole club of them was definitely disturbing. Abigail did use her wits to defeat them but the minute she got to the island and there were all these men I started to feel uncomfortable. I have only read one of Swenson’s other books, Eight Perfect Murders, which was NOTHING like this. It was more like an homage to the classic murder mystery.
I just finished this book, thanks for your review. One thing which confused me is : why was Bruce so surprised when Abigail confessed to her infidelity and accused him of setting her up? Surely he knew fully well what happened between her and Scottie? It sounded like he didn’t know they had slept together until Abigail told him. Or was he just playing dumb!
I’m going to find that part and take a look!