Book Description:
**The unmissable new thriller from the queen of the modern-day murder mystery.**
Snow is falling in the exclusive alpine ski resort of Saint Antoine, as the shareholders and directors of Snoop, the hottest new music app, gather for a make or break corporate retreat to decide the future of the company. At stake is a billion-dollar dot com buyout that could make them all millionaires, or leave some of them out in the cold.
The clock is ticking on the offer, and with the group irrevocably split, tensions are running high. When an avalanche cuts the chalet off from help, and one board member goes missing in the snow, the group is forced to ask – would someone resort to murder, to get what they want?
My Thoughts:
I love a good murder mystery and have to say that Ruth Ware certainly does not disappoint when it comes to this genre. In fact if Agatha Christie was still to be alive, she would be giving her a run for her money!
The setting of a chalet in a ski resort was both wonderfully idyllic yet secluded enough to up the anti when it comes to the air of suspense. What starts out to be a great getaway mixing business and pleasure for the staff within the Snoop company, ends up being a deadly and dangerous one. There are quite a lot of characters so it did take me a little while to remember who is who. Most are more background characters though with the story flicking between Liz one of the Snoop members and Erin a member of staff who lives in to look after the guests.
Along with Erin we have Danny, another member of staff, whose character I especially loved. I enjoyed the working relationship as well as friendship between both characters. It’s obvious that Erin has something from her past that she is hiding, which added to the suspense of what was going on inside the chalet.
Tensions rise throughout the story when the group are cut off from the outside world. Its not long before its obvious that one of the people in the chalet is a killer but who? Well if you are an amateur sleuth, you are going to devour this novel. I was pointing my finger at everyone and getting it horribly wrong. This isn’t just about the who though, it also about the why and it makes for some compulsive reading.
One By One is the perfect title for this page turner of a read. I couldn’t help but think of Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then there Was None’. The remote location with a small number of characters with murder in the midst. That’s where the similarities end though and Ruth Ware shows that she rightly deserves to be one of the leading names in this genre. The chapters are relatively short and the deeper into the story I got the less I wanted to get back to reality. Towards the end I was holding my breath as to just who was going to get out of it alive and it ended up being an edge of your seat read that had me feeling quite nervous in which direction the author would take me. A tense, nail biting ‘whodunnit’!
My thanks to NetGalley, Harvill Secker for a readers copy of this book. All opinions are my own and not biased in anyway.
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