One By One - Ruth Ware

Mystery

Rating: 7/10

The premise of Ware’s latest: a group of employees on a corporate retreat to a picturesque ski lodge in the French Alps find their getaway horribly disrupted when an avalanche cuts off their access to the outside world. In the claustrophobic confinement of the lodge, the group finds tempers rising, personalities clashing, and long-buried secrets threatening to reappear. And then, unsurprisingly, people start turning up dead and we are faced with the reality that a murderer is running amuck.

Replete with the red herrings, twists, and the slow burn of suspense that we have come to expect from Ware, this is great read to wile away the hours with. The guilty culprit was maddeningly obvious to me from almost the moment they were introduced but I came to understand that the mystery was more about who was going to get bumped off.  And spoiler alert…it is more than just one!

Footnote: May our own “locked room” situations remain bloodless.  At this point in this seemingly endless pandemic that’s really all we can ask for.