One By One

Ruth Ware’s upcoming novel, One By One, is set in a luxe ski lodge where feuding tech founders combine a skiiing holiday and a contentious board vote. This is a locked-door mystery, or really a snowed-in mystery, when an avalanche cuts off the residents of the chalet, along with the two staffers who keep the wealthy guests fed and the chalet cleaned.

Like in Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party, most of the people snowed in are kind of unlikeably privileged. Their app, Snoop, has brought everyone wealth, but most of the team already started out with private school educations, family money, and good looks. Slight exceptions are Carl, the older, cranky lawyer, and quiet Liz, the former receptionist and office manager. There’s a heavy divide between the tech rich having their mandatory-fun group skiing trip, and the chalet staff who actually have to work.

The first death — it’s not exactly a spoiler to tell you that someone’s going to die under mysterious circumstances, is it? — seems like a tragic accident. But the second death couldn’t possibly be an accident, could it? And, since the ski lodge is cut off from everyone else by an avalanche, with no cell signal and no one in or out, that means someone staying in the house is a murderer. This locked-door, one-by-one theme seemed like a clear homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, without being too derivative.  The tension stays high throughout the book, mixing survival from the elements and survival from a murderer in the group, who’s already killed someone to protect their secrets. There were a few moments when I was on Team Nobody, and kind of OK with some of the jerks meeting with mysterious accidents, but that only made all the millions of motives more believable, and meant everyone was a suspect.

I was just delighted to get this one on NetGalley, I really liked Ruth Ware’s suspenseful other novels The Turn of the Key,  The Death of Mrs. Westaway, and The Lying Game, and this is another page-turning suspense. I’m reading this in coronaquarantine, so I connected even more with the isolation, and the fancy canapes seemed even more luxurious in these months without restaurants.

One By One will be released on September 8, 2020, I received an advance copy from NetGalley for review. (Free books have never stopped me from snarking about a bad novel.)