Review: 'Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die' by Mallory Arnold
Pub. Date: 14/07/2026
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
One isolated cabin. One cheating boyfriend. One plan to get even.
When Nora, Ruby, and Cham discover that they've each been dating the same man, what starts as outrage quickly spirals into a plot for revenge. Together they hatch a plan to lure their boyfriend to a romantic getaway in a secluded cabin at the top of a snow-covered mountain.
Only what was meant to be harmless payback soon takes a chilling turn when their not-so-adoring boyfriend is found dead in the cabin.
Stranded and snowed in, the women begin to look at each other with increasing suspicion. And as tensions rise, hidden motives come to light. To survive, each woman must confront her own demons as they fight to uncover if one of them is the killer, or if something else lurks in the freezing wilderness, waiting to pick them off one by one.
I had to put the book aside after chapter 1 because we start Cross My Heart with a horrible boyfriend who is scamming his girlfriends out of significant amounts of the money. The reason I had to put it aside was because I wanted to strangle him and yell at our girls for not trusting their instincts and refusing. However, once I got past that and returned to the book, I had a great old time with it. As mentioned above, this book truly has almost everything that you might encounter in a thriller. Considering just how much is going on, I was impressed that Mallory Arnold manages to keep it all pretty cohesive and tightly plotted. I think the novel probably also could have worked if we removed certain elements, but with everything that is going on the novel gives you a really nice "oh my God now what" feeling that keeps you engaged.
Nora, Ruby, and Cham share the misfortune of one POS boyfriend shared between them. When they realise what is going on, they confront him and he disappears, but that is very much not the end of it. With the police utterly useless, they come up with a plot to scare him into confessing which involves an abandoned cabin in the snowy woods on an isolated mountain. That's already quite a plan, but obviously it all goes awry. We are clued in to the fact that everything goes wrong by the fact that Cross My Heart actually starts at the end, with a police interrogation. The novel switches back and forth between this interrogation and the happenings themselves, building up a nice kind of tension as reveals in one timeline influence the other. I also liked that the interrogation was written up as a report, so that we got to play with some different mediums as well. Nora, Ruby, and Cham each get their own POVs which aren't necessarily differentiated by voice but each has her own clear identity and her own issues to deal with. It means that the reader is not just wondering what is going to happen but also how these women will work together, if there is betrayal in the air, and if certain secrets will be revealed. This allows for some nice red herrings but also a real sense of women supporting women's rights and women's wrongs.
I read Mallory Arnold's How To Survive a Horror Story last year and really enjoyed it. At the time I especially liked Arnold's inventiveness and eye for great imagery, but felt that we could do a bit more with characterisation and also just tightening up how we plot. With Cross My Heart I can definitely see how Arnold's control over her craft has developed. Our three protagonists feel like their own kind of characters, even if their voices aren't super differentiated, and there is a clear propulsive thrust to the plot. One thing that both Cross My Heart and How To Survive share, however, is that Arnold can tell a really fun story. While of course there is the horror and the terror of it all, there is also a real sense of enjoyment to her writing. I'm not sure how to best describe this, actually, because we have creepy cults, deaths, buckets of blood, all kinds of gross stuff that Arnold definitely manages to make creepy, but throughout it all I also just had a lot of fun with it. It's basically the kind of joy you get out of watching a slasher film where you know it's all too absurd to really happen, and I mean that as a compliment because I love that. It does mean that perhaps readers who are looking for an all-out horror may feel differently about the book. Or maybe it means I've read too many of these books and my scary-levels are way off. I am really enjoying Arnold's books, however, and look forward to what she cooks up next!
I give this novel...
4 Universes!
Cross My Heart, I Hope You Die is a little bit of a bonkers, everything but the kitchen sink, kind of thriller and I had a great time with it. Tightly-plotted and well told, Mallory Arnold presents a really fun story that shows her development as an author as well. Come for the cabin in the woods and stay for the girl power!
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