Review: One by One by Ruth Ware

I just really love a Ruth Ware novel.

One by One follows a group of ten employees at a company retreat in a chalet in the Alps. While there, we find out that the company is divided between folks who want to go public and folks who want to be bought out. The story is told by one of the two employees of the rental company and by one of the ten people from the company. As the week goes on people start to mysteriously die one by one.

I will start with my slight complaint about this book. The ending was very, very long. You get a lot of time spent wrapping up the story when the suspense has dissipated, this does mean I closed the book with that high point of tension and intrigue pretty far in the past, but it also means that folks who want every single question answered to the fullest extent will be elated by the ending. I don't think it was a bad ending, and I did really like all the threads that got wrapped up during it; I just was surprised by its length compared both to other Ruthe Ware books and other books in the genre.

My very favorite thing about Ruth Ware books is the way she writes suspense. The way she slowly and methodically builds the story to a point where you cannot do anything else but read, how she integrated small details that start out innocuous and end up being creepy and ominous, all of the ways she handled tension is just perfect for my reading experience. I now only have one unread Ruth Ware book, and I am sad about that because I so love the way she does this.

I am going to talk very vaguely about the killer in this paragraph. I think it is going to be so vague as to not spoil, but feel free to skip if you haven't read. I have seen so many people say this book was incredibly predictable, and I think I had a vastly different reading experience than these people. I think in the beginning you have an inkling as to who it is but no proof; then Ware makes you jump from suspect to suspect until about 60% of the way through where you are meant to have developed a hunch, then with slightly more than 100 pages left you should be pretty sure so that by the time the showdown is being set up you know what is happening before you are explicitly told, and you start to really feel that tension. So for roughly half of the book, you are pretty much guaranteed to know who the killer is, but that isn't a failure of the book that is very much intentional. Not that folks can't dislike that, just that it isn't meant to be a shock by the time it is revealed, the reader should have been surprised by this earlier in the book, and the author has moved on to building tension. At least that was my reading experience; some folks were probably sure 50 pages in, but that was not my experience!

I think I am particularly attached to Ruth Ware's work because I love how she incorporates fun structural or media elements into the story. Quick aside to say that the company on retreat is called Snoop, they make an app that allows you to listen to what other people are listening to at the same time, it actually legitimately seems like a fun concept, and all you can know about others in the app is what they have in their bio and what they are currently listening to and how many other people are subscribed/currently listening too. Every chapter started with who was narrating, their Snoop username, what they are currently listening to, how many people are listening with them, and their follower count. This is a fun element that is incorporated very well into the story. The book also starts out with a list of the company members followed by a small article published by a British news source five days into the company trip telling the reader how many deaths are incoming.

These structural elements really are fun with building tension and providing clues in a very interesting and fun way. I genuinely really loved the way they are incorporated, and it is absolutely a factor in why I keep reading her work.

This book also has one of my very favorite silly British (or mostly British?) tropes. I can see some folks rolling their eyes at this, but I think it gave room for some interesting commentary, is a good balance to some of Ware's other novels, and is just delightfully fun, and I will never be mad at this trope.

I would absolutely recommend this book, specifically to Christie fans, folks who want a very winter mystery, a very corporate mystery, or a pretty sporty mystery. Also, to people who want a mystery that talks about gender and power and class a lot, but that is kind of all of Ware's work.

I gave this book five stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph