Hello beautiful people!! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get into Zero Days by Ruth Ware a heart-racing thriller in which we the reader are on the countdown with the main character to crack the mystery. With a dynamic and unique plot and die-hard characters, Zero Days is definitely an interesting read.
Main Characters:
- Jack: Works as a duo with her husband Gabe testing business security, is rattled when one night after coming back from a tough job she finds her husband murdered in their apartment, soon realizing that she is the main suspect but also the only one who can crack the case, Jack has to decide what’s more important her life or avenging her husbands
- Gabe: Jack’s husband and the computer whiz half of their business duo, even though he has a tough past had managed in the last while to turn his problems into his gains, seems to have no enemies but clearly does
- Helena: Jack’s older sister who helps her evade police as Jack tries to find out what happened to Gabe
- Cole: Like Gabe is a computer whiz who has managed to make a good living off of his skills, is Gabe’s lifelong best friend and one of the few people Jack can trust once the suspicions turn on her
My Review
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Ruth Ware, her novels, and her writing style. I think sadly Zero Days wasn’t the best introduction to her books. Don’t get me wrong overall it wasn’t a bad book, but it also wasn’t great. The strengths of the book really are good though and it does make you want to continue on with the plot and finish out the book so the downfalls don’t completely ruin the book or anything.
Zero Days by Ruth Ware is a twisty mystery in which a desperate wife races against the clock and her enemies to try and track down her husband’s killer. There is this unique spin to the book in which Jack and her husband Gabe are this business duo but their work puts them in odd situations, making it so that first getting into the book you would think they were both robbers or something. We come to find out that this is their thing, they work as a team Jack on the ground and Gabe behind the computer to break into businesses that hire them to test their security systems and then give feedback as to what could be done differently next time. So essentially their work is doing something that feels wrong but isn’t. When hired the bosses of the company don’t tell their staff for them to test the accuracy meaning sometimes they get mistaken as legitimate robbers. After working a hard job Jack is a bit lazier than usual causing her to get caught and arrested and of course, no one will believe her story, her husband who should be answering his phone isn’t, and the boss of the company won’t pick up either. Once she gets free from the police she finds that her horrible night is nowhere near ending. Stumbling onto the horrific scene of her murdered husband, Jack’s future changes in the blink of an eye. Cooperative with the police but also caught up in her grief Jack soon sees that the police don’t see her as the grieving widow, but the acting murderer. Racing against the police, and the person who killed her husband Jack must find out who is trying to frame her for her husband’s murder and why. I enjoyed the element of the book in which Jack has always had these skills of breaking into places and finding info that she shouldn’t see but used it for good up until the point of losing her husband. With the loss, she does a big jump and no longer cares about good or bad and is on this obsessive path to find the truth. Kind of John Wick style in a way I guess.
Overall I gave Zero Days a 6.5/10 rating. There was so much potential for this book to have been a bit stronger because the plot and the countdown-style chapters were very interesting and pulled you in. Sadly I think a downfall for me was the book didn’t need to be as long as it was. I noticed that about mid-book I was getting a bit bored and just wanted to get to the next big thing in the book. I think if maybe the book was cut down a bit it just wouldn’t have felt like it dragged on so much. I think as well this book starts off really thrilling and exciting but this gets lost as the book continues. There is this kind of continuous bomb dropping if you will in the first half of the book that makes it seem like that will be the pace as it continues. I mean it’s like Jack is on this thrilling job, then she gets arrested, then she finds Gabe, then she gets put under suspicion for specific things she is being framed for. It’s just continuous at first and then it just drops as we move on from the earlier section of the book. Again I think if the book had been cut down a bit I think it could have helped this issue a bit as well.
At the start of the book, I really enjoyed Jack as a character and I thought she was super badass and strong. Again like other things, this kind of gets lost throughout the book. Don’t get me wrong I mean the whole book revolves around her looking for her husband’s killer by herself so in all aspects she is still strong and badass. Something that stuck out for me though was how she came to sort of devalue her life with the loss of Gabe’s. I mean we get that the two loved each other but Jack throughout the book says multiple times that she doesn’t care about living as long as she finds her husband’s killer, and then proceeds to do a bunch of dangerous things that almost kill her. I am not sure I just felt like the attributes that pulled me into her character early on were lost as she got more and more obsessive with things throughout the book. It just seemed lame that she was willing to die herself to find out who killed her husband. I also maybe just got a bit tired of her throughout the book. I mean I also was like okay so you’re willing to ruin your life to find your husband’s killer, got it, but did she have to drag her sister into it? I just hated the situations she kept putting her sister in knowing it could get her in trouble too. Don’t get me wrong though if it was me I would probably do that stuff for my brother too, but I would try not to implicate him so much, it was crazy.
This may be a first for me to say in a review and it hurts a bit to say but I really don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone I know. It over all wasn’t bad but I think it just didn’t play out in a way that matched what the plot needed. I enjoyed the ending at least but I will say I guessed the big twist pretty early on. I think maybe that’s why it was a bit of a bummer for me too, the twists just weren’t that good, if anything they kind of flopped. I expected this big thing of Gabe being caught up in some online thing or something but it just was weird. The other twist at the very end as well is kind of obvious just based on different things said in the first bit of the book, but it was sweet nonetheless to wrap up a horrible scene.
Has anyone else read Zero Days by Ruth Ware or any of her other books? What did you think?
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to see any spoilers ***
Alright so who killed Gabe and why?
Well as we maybe could have all guessed it was his best friend Cole who throughout the book was the only one who Jack could ‘trust’ and the only one other than her sister who knew she didn’t kill Gabe. Well of course he does because he did it, kind of, he hired someone to do it. I guess Gabe found out that Cole was going to allow his app which he made for parents to track their children’s phones, to be accessed by not-so-safe people. Gabe was going to expose him and in turn, Cole shut him up. It was all just kind of an eye roll because it made sense but given the drama in the first half of the book, I was expecting a bit more.
The twist of course that comes at the end is that Jack is pregnant so Gabe while gone isn’t fully and will live through their child. As soon as Gabe died and Jack was all sad that they would never have the family they wanted in my head I was like ‘Oh yeah I bet she’s going to be pregnant or something’ and darn it, I was right. I mean it was sweet though because it was kind of sad how alone Jack was without her husband and how much he meant to her, so having this made me happy that she had some kind of win throughout all the tragedy.
I mean that’s kind of it for the spoilers in the book. So, you can see why I was a bit thrown off by how the book played out, it just didn’t feel like the twists matched the energy the book gave in the first half, but maybe that’s just me.
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