Zero Days

I admit I haven’t posted lately because I’ve seemed to hit a string of bad books (or more precisely, “books I didn’t enjoy” is the better term). It’s gotten to the point over the past month where I’ve read at least two books I haven’t even finished! I am not going to review those because it’s not fair when I didn’t finish them; who knows, maybe the endings would have been their redemption, although I highly doubt it. But there is one book that I didn’t enjoy and I did finish, so that’s my next review. The reason I stuck it out with this particular book is that it’s the new one from Ruth Ware. She’s one of my favorite “new” authors; her first book was published in 2015 and she tends to stick with who-dun-it, psychological thrillers. My favs have easily been “The Lying Game” and “One By One.” So when I got my hands on an advance copy of her newest thriller, “Zero Days,” I was excited. Alas, my faith in Ware to produce a good mystery is slipping. This book is very tech-heavy, which I don’t mind but I feel like she spent too much of the book showing off her knowledge of modern tech-speak and not enough on developing an actual storyline. To me, this is very much an updated version of “The Fugitive.” It’s about Jack, the female protagonist who works with her husband, Gabe, as a penetration specialist (together, they are hired by companies to break in and evaluate their security for lapses). He runs the tech side of things; she’s the physical labor. But one day, she returns home from a job to find Gabe murdered. The suspicion quickly turns to her, but she escapes being arrested time and time again, determined to find Gabe’s real killer and prove her innocence. Yep, we’ve heard this plotline before. And considering there are maybe two other people introduced as potential suspects, it doesn’t take the reader long to figure it out. This book dragged for me, and the only reason I stuck with it was for the author. Going forward, I’m not going to be as excited when I hear another one of her books is coming out. The book before this one, “The It Girl,” came out in July 2022 and now “Zero Days” is officially coming out in June 2023, so I’m wondering if she was on a deadline/contract to get one book out a year and the quality of her work is suffering for it.