Zero Days
Some nights are just full of bad decisions. Or bad luck. Jack (Jacinta) is certainly experiencing one of those evenings.
As a security specialist, she has been hired to penetrate an insurance company to test just how well their current level of protection works, but from the start things go awry and Jack quickly finds herself caught by the corporate guards, then taken into custody and questioned by the police. While her husband Gabe works frantically to contact the client and clear her name, a disgruntled ex who happens to be a cop, makes an appearance, gives Jack a hard time and ultimately releases her.
Jack hates being beholden to her ex but the truth is, she needed his help. Shortly after she had arrived at the station, Gabe had gone silent. Jack is exhausted, anxious, and angry when she leaves, only to have her phone die immediately after she calls the Uber which will take her back to her car. Jack wants to race home, but in unfamiliar territory and with no maps app to help, she gets lost several times, takes an inordinate amount of time to get to her house and when she finally staggers through her door she discovers that the worst is yet to come: Gabe is dead, murdered at his computer.
Shocked, Jack staggers to the couch and doesn’t call the police immediately but simply sits in stunned silence. When she finally gets herself together and calls them, they quickly narrow in on one suspect – her. Submerged in grief and determined not to take the fall for a crime she didn’t commit, Jack goes on the run and begins a desperate quest to find who really did kill Gabe- and why.
Before getting too deeply into this review of Ruth Ware’s Zero Days, I’m going to address the elephant in the room – ye olde dead cell phone. Ware loves using malfunctioning tech in her stories, an issue some readers oft complain of, and this story begins with a dozy of a glitch – a woman who relies heavily on her cell leaving home with one that is apparently not fully charged. If this topic is one that troubles you, either be prepared to be annoyed or skip the book altogether. I’ll just add that technology is used heavily throughout the story. As someone who uses tech daily, this tends not to bother me but again, some readers have expressed discontent with this aspect of the author’s books, so be been warned, it is very present here.
The author has an easy-to-read writing style with brisk pacing that keeps us invested in the mystery. She also delivers consistent characterization throughout the novel, although that turned out to be a mixed blessing. Jack staying true to who she is – a likeable middle-class woman who finds herself in a tragic, unprecedented situation – showcases the author’s talent. I hate nothing more than having problems solved in a story by having the character change the nature of who they are. Unless there is a good reason for it, people don’t make large personality changes. That said, Jack starts the tale prone to dumb decisions and stays that way throughout the text. This is less a whodunit than it is a novel of someone racing about stumbling into information. That doesn’t tend to be the kind of narrative I prefer, so while the excellent writing made this a pleasant enough read, it’s not a book I would ever pick up again.
One reason for that is that the plot – from the inciting incident to all the time Jack spends on the run – is completely unbelievable. I know that the truth is often stranger than fiction and something this crazy could actually have happened, but from a reading perspective, I just found the whole thing so ludicrous and Jack’s behavior so hapless, that I couldn’t submerge myself in the tale the author was telling.
This is probably the shortest review I have ever written but there isn’t really much information I can impart on Zero Days. It’s a low-key chase mystery that relies very heavily on the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Fans of the author will doubtless want to give it a try but I would steer newcomers to any of Ms. Ware’s older works. They are all stronger than this one.
Recent Comments
She gets lost driving to her own home? Uh, that’d be a big no for me . . .
Yep, the whole beginning (dead cell phone, getting lost, sitting on the sofa six feet from her dead husband rather than calling the cops) was a problem.
Ware’s reliance on malfunctioning tech in her first couple of books made me disinclined to try her subsequent work—and here we go again: another cell phone that doesn’t work! Good lord—you’d think Ware could come up with something else at this point, but she’s an absolute one-trick pony when it comes to cell phones not having service, running out of juice, being used by someone other than the owner, etc. The fact that the heroine goes on an important “espionage” assignment without a fully-charged cell phone and/or a portable charger (perhaps someone should tell Ware that they do make those) puts the heroine in the TSTL category and this book in the “Hard Pass” category for me.
I can definitely understand your point. You are very right about the charger (most people keep one in their car) and also, wouldn’t you carry a spare battery if you are that dependent on your phone? That said, I am overly reliant on tech (I once spent half an hour wondering how I could write a note when my printer was down, only to remember I own pens), so I sometimes relate to her character’s issues with malfunctioning machines. When your plan is to print something and you suddenly can’t, you don’t say to yourself, “Right, let’s go analog”, you waste time wondering how the tragedy of a non-working printer happened. :- ) But this time was that bridge too far for me. What really got me was sitting on a sofa six feet from your dead husband’s body. I find my husband in a pool of blood, I call an ambulance. I don’t care how dead he looks I don’t give up hope. I would think anyone’s reaction would be to scream the bloody neighborhood down looking for help. If she had passed out I would have understood, but she just sat down stunned. That’s the reaction to a lottery win, not a corpse. The writing wasn’t strong enough to make me believe in that particular kind of shock.
Oh, I feel ya. One day I had a bunch of errands to run. I went all over town, dropping off, picking up, making purchases, etc. When I got home and walked into the house, the first thing I saw was my phone sitting on the end table by the sofa. Somehow I’d left the house without my phone and had run all my errands foolishly assuming my connection to the rest of the world was in my purse. I suddenly had an attack of retrospective nerves: what if I’d had car trouble, been in an accident, or needed to call someone? Of course, I had just spent hours driving around without my phone, and all was fine, but it was just the thought of what COULD have happened without my cell phone that troubled me. Yes, I also feel reliant on tech, but I’m not the heroine of a Ruth Ware mystery, lol.
OMG, I did the same thing recently! What a shock it was to find my phone at home; I was convinced I had lost it at Costco! You wouldn’t have wanted to be the heroine in this mystery – this level of hapless would be dangerous to your survival :-)