Ruth Ware talks about her latest mystery, “One By One”
In a secluded luxury chalet tucked away in a French ski resort in St Antonie, a dozen people find themselves trying to survive a massive avalanche. Along with the freezing temperatures and lack of electricity and cellphone service, someone in the group has begun killing off the others.
British author Ruth Ware’s most recent novel “One By One” is a perfect read if you’re looking to cozy up with a good book and a blanket in the winter months: her descriptions of this chalet — with its stunning panoramic views, powderywhite snow, crackling wood fires and cocktails served on a tray — are vivid in this whodunit.
The characters include 10 employees from a tech company called Snoop that booked the chalet for a work weekend getaway, as well as two live- in caretakers.
“I knew I wanted to write a book focused on a work retreat because having written lots of novels about friendships and marriage, toxic families and all this other stuff, I’d never tackled the other huge relationship in most of our lives, which is with our colleagues,” Ware said during a recent phone interview. “They’re the people we spend most of our day with. We come home, spend a few hours with our families, but we spend eight or more hours a day in the company of colleagues, so I decided to tackle that world and wanted to set it in a ski resort because I love skiing.”
Ware is a 43- year- old married mother of two who lives just outside Brighton, England.
Before she became a successful author, she had jobs as a waitress, a bookseller and a teacher. She broke into the business by writing a series of young adult fantasy novels about witches under her real name, Ruth Warburton. When she started writing more adult psychological crime thrillers, like “In a Dark, Dark Wood,” “The Woman in Cabin 10” and “Turn of the Key,” she began to write under Ruth Ware.
Though she admits she’s no expert on the world of technology, she said she came up with the idea to introduce the various characters in “One By One” via a social media biotype style using the made- up company Snoop’s own music app.
Snoop users, including a slew of popular musicians and celebrities, can link to whatever streaming app they prefer and share their playlists and listen in real- time to what others on the platform are listening to. Theoretically, according to the book, you could listen to whatever James Blunt ( whose music is referenced in the book) is listening to as he’s listening to it at the moment.
“I started to think about all the ways technology could be creepy and could help solve a mystery,” Ware said. “That said, I realized I’d given myself a really big cast of characters and I needed a pithy way to introduce them and that’s where the social media bios began coming in. They were almost the last thing I added to the manuscript. Everything kind of came in backwards for me on this one.”
Ware said she secretly hopes someone takes her idea for the Snoop app and brings it to life.
“I totally feel that it should exist,” she said. “I haven’t copyrighted it. So, you know, if someone could just pay me a small word.”
Ware said she wrote a bit of herself into both of the strong female characters.
“They represent both sides of my personality,” she explained. “Like Erin, I’m much more comfortable in a role. But I’m also like Liz, where
I’m not a super socially confident person. I’m always that person who walks into a party and thinks, ‘ Everybody here is cooler than me.’ But like Erin, I’ve always gravitated towards a job where I had a role and I was able to take a bottle of wine and pour for the people to justify my presence by some other way.”
“That definitely comes out in the book, too. Erin is someone who doesn’t want to relinquish her role partly because she’s very aware that if she does, the person who takes charge of the situation might be someone who doesn’t have everybody’s best interests at heart. So she steps up to the plate even when she doesn’t necessarily feel she’s the right person to do it.”