{"id":7110,"date":"2022-12-15T13:06:26","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T18:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=7110"},"modified":"2023-04-21T15:13:27","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T19:13:27","slug":"into-the-woods-with-ruth-ware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/into-the-woods-with-ruth-ware\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the Woods with Ruth Ware"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

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.\u00a0 The reasons can vary.\u00a0 I might be swamped with review copies.\u00a0 I might not have been in the mood for that particular book after sampling it.\u00a0 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 clich\u00e9d or badly written.<\/p>\r\n

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.\u00a0 This past week I finally caught up with Ruth Ware’s gripping debut In a Dark, Dark Wood.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

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.\u00a0 Something horrible has clearly happened.\u00a0 Is she a murderer?\u00a0 She’s desperate to regain her memory and for much of the book that struggle is a dark, dark thread.<\/p>\r\n

How did she end up in the hospital?\u00a0 Well, because she should have said no to a bizarre invitation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The invitation breaks into her solitude: it’s for what the English call “a hen party” and Americans call a bachelorette party.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\r\n

The party is hours from London, very remote, in a big, isolated, ugly ultra-modern house.\u00a0 Though it’s not haunted, it has far too many large, un-curtained windows and is surrounded by bleak forest.\u00a0 Everything about it is oppressive, creepy, and exposed.\u00a0 Tensions soon rise among the motley group of partiers and what seems at first to be an Agatha Christie homage turns violent and bloody.<\/p>\r\n

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.\u00a0 Ware is deft at building tension, evocatively describing people and places, and the book is explosive in many ways.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And a woman who by all rights should have been far more wary and suspicious from the start.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free<\/em> Press<\/em> and other newspapers and public radio stations.\u00a0 He’s the author of ten Nick Hoffman mysteries<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 The reasons can vary.\u00a0 I might be swamped with review copies.\u00a0 I might not have been in the mood for that particular book after sampling it.\u00a0 Or I might be wary of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[877,2],"tags":[2713,1600,219,1939,1424,321,837,197,397,19,1536,2710,122,378],"class_list":["post-7110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-writing","tag-british-crime-fiction","tag-crime","tag-crime-fiction","tag-crime-novels","tag-england","tag-fiction","tag-london","tag-mysteries","tag-mystery","tag-novels","tag-novels-of-suspense","tag-ruth-ware","tag-suspense","tag-suspense-novels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7110"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7305,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110\/revisions\/7305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}