Ruth Ware

“The Game She Plays Can Turn Deadly”

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Siena Sterling has combined some time-tested fiction tropes in her new quasi-suspense novel: the fish-out-of-water, posh country house gatherings with some kind of accident, the femme fatale, and a woman worried she’s not good enough for her lover. The results are uneven despite the surprise at the end.

It’s 1980 and after a bad breakup, Nicola leaves benighted Buffalo for Paris but is  easily swayed on board her flight by a charming Englishman, James, to spend time with him in the south of France.  She’s so naive and unworldly that she wonders if there’s a bakery in his village because one of her goals in life is to eat a flaky croissant.  Sterling misses a chance to offer readers something special when Nicola and her boyfriend visit the southern French town of Uzès and there’s no description of its cathedral, the duke’s castle, or the lovely arcades. 

The pair go off to a country manor in England to spend a shooting weekend with James’s friends where Nicola is astonished and humbled nonstop. His friends all went to Cambridge together!  How does she know which fork to use at dinner!  Brits can be snide!  Why hasn’t she seen the cook!  Three-course meals are exotic! The hosts will someday have titles of nobility! They already have servants!

But for all her cluelessness, Nicola can somehow imagine the most attractive woman in the group would be more fitting in a “salon entertaining French philosophers and Russian novelists.”  That seems too sophisticated an observation for Nicola the way she’s been written.

As for the femme fatale, she’s repeatedly called beautiful and stylish, but she comes across as a run-of-the-mill narcissist, so whatever schemes she has in mind (remember the title) are painfully obvious.

Jealous of this woman’s acrobatic skill during a stupid parlor game after dinner, Nicola actually jumps onto a glass table and humiliates herself despite being uninjured amid all the broken glass.  That reaction makes sense, but she’s so shame-bound and clueless through the book that it feels like overkill–and even worse, she’s not the only hapless female in the book.

The English shooting weekend is marred by someone getting shot (of course), and there’s also a mysterious rich German present who’s so quickly whisked off-stage you wonder why the author bothered.  A second shooting weekend up in Scotland is more dramatic, but it takes way too long to arrive and there’s a clichéd taunting speech by the book’s villain.

The book’s title is a partial misdirection and that’s where the surprise comes in which is arguably the book’s best moment.  Unfortunately, the prose is bland, the settings aren’t vivid enough, and the characters lack depth.  For an unforgettable English house party novel, try Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood or Isabel Colegate’s classic The Shooting Party.  Both are tremendous reads.  ★★

Lev Raphael was the longtime crime fiction reviewer for the Detroit Free Press and has also reviewed for the Washington Post, Jerusalem Report, and several public radio stations.  Guests on his interview show included Erica Jong and Salman Rushdie.

Into the Woods with Ruth Ware

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As a crime fiction reviewer, I’ve often had to say, “Sorry, I haven’t read it” when people ask me about a new book.  The reasons can vary.  I might be swamped with review copies.  I might not have been in the mood for that particular book after sampling it.  Or I might be wary of the publicity blitz around the book since I’ve seen so many crime novels over-hyped by publishers and been disappointed when they turn out clichéd or badly written.

But then it’s a wonderful surprise to pick up a book with thousands of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and discover that it truly lives up to the promotional material.  This past week I finally caught up with Ruth Ware’s gripping debut In a Dark, Dark Wood.

After an enigmatic brief prologue, the book opens in a hospital with Leonora, a heroine who can’t remember how she got there but has hands sticky with blood.  Something horrible has clearly happened.  Is she a murderer?  She’s desperate to regain her memory and for much of the book that struggle is a dark, dark thread.

How did she end up in the hospital?  Well, because she should have said no to a bizarre invitation.  Leonora, a crime writer herself, has led a solitary life for a decade after university for undisclosed reasons but readers know they’ll find out and will surely hope there’s high drama involved.  The invitation breaks into her solitude: it’s for what the English call “a hen party” and Americans call a bachelorette party.  Weirdly, she hasn’t been invited to the wedding itself and it takes some coaxing from a friend of hers and the bride’s to say “yes.”

The party is hours from London, very remote, in a big, isolated, ugly ultra-modern house.  Though it’s not haunted, it has far too many large, un-curtained windows and is surrounded by bleak forest.  Everything about it is oppressive, creepy, and exposed.  Tensions soon rise among the motley group of partiers and what seems at first to be an Agatha Christie homage turns violent and bloody.

In the second half of the novel we learn what drove her and her bride-to-be friend apart and while some of the revelations aren’t as surprising as you might wish, they fall into place in a satisfying way.  Ware is deft at building tension, evocatively describing people and places, and the book is explosive in many ways.  It’s also intriguing to read about a crime novelist caught up in a series of mysteries, a woman who might be a murderer herself.  And a woman who by all rights should have been far more wary and suspicious from the start.  When you read a Christie novel, a great deal is revealed in dialogue and readers of this novel should pay close attention to what characters say if they want to figure out what’s really going on in this taut, enticing novel.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and other newspapers and public radio stations.  He’s the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries.