One by One by Ruth Ware

One by One by Ruth Ware is a great one to get you in the mood for the upcoming ski season. Lots of snow, extreme cold and an avalanche! What more could ask for — expect this book, a warm blanket and something warm to drink!!

Lindsay’s review

The perfect atmospheric and suspenseful read to escape into!

An isolated ski lodge. A corporate retreat. A devastating and destructive avalanche. A missing person. Secretive and suspicious characters. Thick underlying tension. Hidden secrets and motives. All of these aspects combine to create an easy, engrossing and entertaining story that had me guessing from start to finish.

I really enjoyed the enveloping atmosphere throughout this novel. I truly felt alone and isolated in the snowy mountainside along with these characters. The mystery and suspense was consistent and engaging throughout. I questioned every characters’ intention at one point or another.

I enjoyed the dual perspectives — a ski lodge employee and one of the guests staying at the lodge. They were intriguing characters that provided perfect insight into all sides of the story. I really enjoyed the short chapters and the way the perspectives flowed, however, there was some overlap that felt repetitive and slightly dragged the story out.

In the beginning, I did find myself confused with keeping up with “who was who”. I would have liked more substance with the supporting characters near the start. My confusion subsided as the story progressed and I was able to decipher between the multiple secondary characters.

Overall, this was the perfect book to escape into without having to “think” too much. A pure entertainment read full of atmosphere, mystery and tension.

Brenda’s review

Lock Room Mysteries are one of my favourite types of stories for an entertaining read. I love the intense, isolating and claustrophobic feel of them. Ruth Ware knows how to bring one by creating one tense setting here after an avalanche at a ski lodge in the French Alps snows in the characters. Erin and Danny host employees of a social media company (sounds like a nightmare already, right) who are there to promote “mindfulness and collaboration,” but they might have other motivations to being there.

While Ruth Ware does a great job creating that tense setting I love, there were a couple of things that nagged at me. Like how are there, only two staff members snowed in with them? I am not a skier, but I think it takes a few employees to run ski hill, especially with these high maintained guests. Did I miss something? Anyways I guess that is a small nagging point. The other was the characters. There were many characters to keep track of, and none really had anything interesting to them to stand out. While I don’t find anything interesting about social media, I do with tech startups. A team of tech startups should lead to some diverse, interesting characters. Nothing was exciting here with these characters, just shallow, unlikable characters. There wasn’t enough tension and suspense created with the characters and I didn’t feel any sense of danger from them even though they were being killed one by one.

It was all about the setting here for me and the tension with the danger the weather put them under and their escape from it. I enjoyed the showdown even though it was a bit unrealistic. Overall this was an enjoyable, fun and entertaining read for me.

I received a copy from the publisher one NetGalley