Zero Days

 Zero Days- Ruth Ware

Gallery/Scout Press

Release Date:

Rate: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: Hired by companies to break into buildings and hack security systems, Jack and her husband, Gabe, are the best penetration specialists in the business. But after a routine assignment goes horribly wrong, Jack arrives home to find her husband dead. To add to her horror, the police are closing in on their suspect—her.

Suddenly on the run and quickly running out of options, Jack must decide who she can trust as she circles closer to the real killer in this unputdownable and heart-pounding mystery.

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In a "Fugitive"-like book, Jacintha "Jack" Cross becomes the number one suspect in her husband's murder and flees to try to prove her innocence and find out who actually killed Gabe. Fortunately for her, she's a security expert and great at her job, so avoiding notice (and CCTV), climbing walls, and picking locks are all in a day's work for her. 

Interestingly, a lot of what drew me to want to read this book was also what annoyed me about this book. Jack wants to find out who killed her husband because the police are taking the easy and obvious way out- her. But she has no idea what to do to prove her innocence or figure out who did kill him because she has no idea who would want Gabe dead. She becomes a bit of a classic amateur sleuth flailing around- which I generally can't stand. We get lots of painstaking details about how Jack breaks into places and gets things to work for her (presumably to show that Ware has done her homework) that got really old for me really fast. Jack is in her own head pretty much the entire book, which could work on screen because you'd see other things happening, but didn't do it for me in the book. It also didn't help that while I saw the bad guy from the beginning, she didn't figure it out for more than 60% of the book. I get it, real life vs book, there's a small pool of suspects, she's focused on other things, but she practically needed it drawn out for her, as well as the motive. So I was annoyed with her as well as the cops for being dumb. But high marks for her being stubborn! Also, the times when she stops to think about Gabe, you really feel her grief. The emotions really pour off the page there in a throat-catching way that was quite well done. I think Ware made a good call by letting us get to know Gabe a little bit before killing him, he wasn't completely an unknown figure, but someone with a sense of humor who clearly loved his wife and in the little bit we had of him I liked him. So his death was personal enough I wanted to see how it was resolved. Whether the resolution was satisfying or not I guess depends. The way things were set up means it probably worked out as well as it could. No more to say there since that would be spoilers!

I was definitely conflicted about this book. It was what it said it was- a take on THE FUGITIVE (personally I didn't see any MR & MRS SMITH). Fast-paced, non-stop, run from the cops all the way. I liked the theory more than I ended up liking the reality of the book, but each reader will have to judge it for themselves.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

It Girl

 

The It Girl- Ruth Ware

Simon and Schuster/Gallery

Release Date: July 12, 2022

Rating: 📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford.

Vivacious, bright, occasionally vicious, and the ultimate It girl, she quickly pulled Hannah into her dazzling orbit. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends—Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily—during their first term. By the end of the year, April was dead.

Now, a decade later, Hannah and Will are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison. Relieved to have finally put the past behind her, Hannah’s world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that Neville may have been innocent. As Hannah reconnects with old friends and delves deeper into the mystery of April’s death, she realizes that the friends she thought she knew all have something to hide…including a murder.

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In this new psychological thriller Ruth Ware introduces us to an unlikely group of friends at an Oxford college, all orbiting around "It Girl" April- rich, beautiful, intelligent, and talented who seemingly has it all. Yet by the end of their second term April is dead, murdered in her rooms. A decade later it comes out that maybe the man sentenced for the murder didn't actually do it- which naturally makes you wonder, if not him, who did kill April?

This is the second Ruth Ware book I've read (One by One was the other) and I definitely liked this one more than I expected to. The book is split into alternating "Before" and "After" chapters (as Hannah's life is divided into 'before April's murder' and 'after April's murder'), introducing us to narrator Hannah, "It Girl" April, and their friends Will, Ryan, Hugh, and Emily, as well as building them up over the course of their college experiences. In the "After" sections it is ten years later, Hannah and Will have moved to Edinburg and are expecting their first child, and the man convicted of killing April dies in prison. They are pushed back into the trauma of the murder and the media circus surrounding the murder and the trial and you get a really good sense of how traumatizing both events were for Hannah, Will, and the others- and how they reacted to it in very different ways. But you also see, before she does I think, that while Hannah might see herself as weak, she is anything but- when the idea comes up that Neville might have been innocent Hannah does face it and does start to confront the memories surrounding that time period, asking herself what she might have gotten wrong and who might have killed April if not Neville. She's a far better friend, in life or death, then April probably deserves, because she doesn't let it go. It effects her marriage and her health, but she feels like she owes it to April and to Neville, a man who sexually harassed her at college, to find out the truth. Is she naive, innocent, and in over her head? Yes. Is that annoying? Yes, often. But it somehow makes her the character you've read a hundred times before and at the same time someone you can pull for the whole way because you see something new through her eyes. You want her to understand that April is a vicious, nasty piece of work while at the same time hoping that Hannah was somehow making April a better person. You want Hannah's innocence to remain intact while knowing it won't, which makes you worry about what will be left when the dust settles- because you care about her and her marriage and her friends through the spell that Ware casts page by page.

There are well-written descriptions of Oxford and what the college and college life are like; wrenching psychological cases of survivor's guilt and looks into our morbid cultural fascination with "it" murders and what they do to the people left behind in the cases; tension weaves through the pages even before anything happens without you able to quite identify why; red herrings leap like spawning salmon; excellent twists and turns getting to the 'who', 'how' and 'why'; and friendships and relationships that will haunt you to the last page.

A must read summer psychological thriller for the mystery lover!

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review