This mystery/thriller follows a group of coworkers who get snowed in during a company retreat. What starts off as a morale-boosting trip turns deadly and as the group members start dropping one by one, the others need to overcome not only the winter elements, but also each other. This is a closed-circle mystery story that is very obviously compared to (and pitched as a similar style story to) Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Closed circle (or locked room) mysteries are probably my favorite sub-type of mystery when done well and by far my least favorite when done poorly. Unfortunately, I found this story to fall in the later category and I ended up really disliking this story by the end. We do lean more into the thriller-y aspects in the last 1/3 of the story, but I found the majority of the plot to be focused on the mystery. This is my first Ruth Ware book and it was a pretty big miss for me, but there were pieces I liked and would be willing to give one of her other books a try in the future.
I'll start with the pieces of this book I actually liked because I think it did have some successful points, but mostly in the less important aspects of the story. I really enjoyed the setting of this mountain chalet for a company retreat. I really enjoyed the choice to have these characters out of their element a bit and to see how the stresses of this new environment might increase already existing issues. I thought the plot mechanic of how these characters get 'locked in' together worked really well and was easily believable and didn't feel overly contrived. I did get a little confused with the explanation of the layout of the different chalets and ski trails but I was able to understand the key aspects even if I couldn't have drawn an accurate map or anything. I also really liked the different characters all working at this company and how their different personalities really bounced off each other well. I think there were some great relationships and tension moments set up but I would have loved to go deeper with these different characters. All in all, the set up we get with the setting and characters at the beginning of the book really made me excited for this story but unfortunately the rest of the book went quickly downhill for me.
My favorite aspects of these types of mysteries is the pretty much built-in tension that the characters and the reader both know the killer is one of the people in this group. We don't know who the killer is, but we do know that due to plot reasons (in this case, an avalanche that blocks their escape) no one can be getting into the group from the outside so if the bodies keep dropping, the murderer is in the building. Technically, this story was successful on this part as the avalanche does cut off the group from the outside world (and, thus, outside help). The next layer of this tension comes from the fact that every character would have motive to kill one (or multiple) of the people in the group so there's a lot of finger pointing and uncertainty that comes from that aspect. This is the part that, for me, really didn't hit. The characters were given motives, but I wasn't convinced at all that these people would actually resort to murder for those reasons. This, combined with the POV choices, really sucked all the tension out of this book for me. The only reason I continued reading the story was in the hope that maybe Ware was going to give me a big twist at the end and reveal some sort of secret motive or maybe another layer to one of the established motives that would make me believe X character is the killer. And while there was a sort of motive twist at the end, it wasn't effective for me at all and, honestly, made me sort of wish I had just stopped reading and looked up spoilers instead. After I finished, I looked up a good number of reviews and there were a good number of people who thought there were enough motives mixed up in the group for them to be invested in that aspect of the mystery. For me, however, I thought it was extremely obvious who the killer was from really early on in the book and I didn't feel like any of the other characters were suspects at any point in the book.
The POV choices that Ware made were the source of a lot of my issues with this story. The story is told through alternating chapters of only 2 of the characters and, in some aspects, these were the two most boring choices for character POV (in my opinion). I really would have preferred this story to be told in either a single POV or if we got basically everyone's POV. I thought the choice of only having 2 POV would cause me to discount theories or motives that I might otherwise pay more attention to because if those theories were about one of the other characters, I would say to myself "that can't be true b/c character X or Y should be involved since we're reading from their POV". Again, I was waiting for maybe Ware to use that sort of logic against me and give a big reveal that included some of the theories I had originally discounted but that wasn't the case (at least, it wasn't the case for the theories that I was thinking of while reading, maybe it did work out for other readers). The timing of the chapter cut offs and POV switches was well done until the last 1/3 of the book where suddenly it was almost like the POVs were overlapping. So, for example, character X would spend 20 minutes doing something, then the POV would change in the next chapter to character Y and their chapter would start during the last 5 minutes of character X's chapter and then continue for another 20 minutes. And that wouldn't be so bad except we would be constantly reminded of the events we just saw character X do by character Y making some comment about how they could hear character X doing whatever they were doing. It got so repetitive with this weird pattern of rewinding time and just seeing almost the same scene a second time before moving forward with the plot. This really slowed down the pacing of the last 1/3 significantly - right at the time when we'd want the pacing to be going faster as we're getting into the more thriller-y plot points.
The final point I'd like to make is about the ending and the final twists - mostly that I didn't feel there really were any. Now, I don't mean that I was able to guess every little thing about the ending. But rather that there wasn't anything that surprised me or twisted something I thought I knew into something brand new. However, the information we get at the ending when we would normally get some sort of twist was just clarification and explanation on the killer's motive. Now, granted, that explanation was new information and did change a little bit how the reader might think about a few of the characters in the book, but it wasn't that super satisfying surprise moment that I (and I think a lot of other readers) look for in a mystery. I also wasn't a fan of the pacing in the last 1/3 (as discussed above) which really made the ending drag. There's a pretty substantial come down after the climax moment which I did appreciate seeing how the surviving characters were dealing with the aftermath. However, that long come down also had me waiting, thinking there would be one big final reveal but there wasn't. Maybe if I hadn't read so many mysteries before and I wasn't anticipating there being a big twist at the end then I would have had a better reading experience. However, the way the ending played out really made it feel like the icing on a pretty mediocre cake.
Overall, this was a pretty big flop for me because so many elements just didn't come together. If there were some things changed such as the POV issues, then the same plot could have easily been a 4 or 5 star read. However, the way this story was executed and the choices Ware made really weren't landing for me. I would be interested in picking up another Ruth Ware book in the future, but I will probably need one to be highly recommended by trusted sources before I do.
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