Zero Days

This was quite a different book from Ruth Ware. Jack and Gabe are married, and work to find security lapses at companies. After a job, Jack returns home to find Gabe dead, his throat slit. She is terrified, and when the cops suspect her, she goes on the run to find Gabe's killer.
As she delves into his murder, she uncovers a secret that Gabe knew, but others want to keep it hidden, and are willing to kill for it. As Jack races against time, she wonders who is a friend or enemy. She takes chances with her life, but she won't stop until she gets answers. As she stays one step ahead of the police, her life is in danger.
An interesting departure from Ware's typical novels, I enjoyed this look at cybersecurity. However, I think it could have show more been tightened up a bit, could have been shorter. show less

ZERO DAYS was a nail-biting rollercoaster ride, and I loved every minute! Honestly, I wasn't sure how I'd feel about this book because techno-stuff is not my thing at all. BUT, I trust Ruth Ware and she did not disappoint!

Jack (Jacintha) and her husband Gabe are "pen testers," people hired by companies to break into their buildings to find security system weak spots. Jack is more of the "muscle" who does the breaking in, while Gabe is the tech-savvy one whose voice is in her earpiece guiding her along.

It's after one of these security jobs that Jack comes home to find her beloved Gabe brutally murdered. With Jack being the prime suspect, she quickly finds herself on the run from police with very few resources and people she can trust. show more She has to figure out who murdered Gabe and why before the police close in.

I'm not a fast reader by any means, but I flew through this book in two evenings. Wow!! Jack was an amazing character, very strong, clever, and resilient. There were a few times when I was yelling at her about one thing or another, but I cut her some slack. The amount of stress she was under was incredible. I enjoyed learning about her relationships with the people closest to her, even though one had to end so tragically.

I think ZERO DAYS will end up being one of my favorite Ruth Ware novels. Plenty of tension to keep me turning the pages, and emotion to make Jack's predicament compelling.

Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for a digital ARC of this book. Opinions are my own. show less

Discovering The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware was a reading highlight of 2019 and the book made it onto my Top 5 Books of 2019 list. I've been chasing that high ever since, so when Ruth Ware's latest Zero Days arrived from the publishers, I dove right in with the hope this would be a return to previous top form.

Our protagonist, Jack and husband Gabe expose the security risks and weaknesses of companies who pay them to break in to their premises or hack their systems online. They're penetration testers or 'pen testers' and Jack is one of the best. Early on in the novel - it's on the cover, so not a spoiler - Jack comes home from a job to find her husband has been murdered and she's the primary suspect.

The trope of the wrongly accused show more fighting to prove their innocence or clear their name is a familiar one and I think I'm beginning to tire of it.

Jack goes on the run to try and work out what happened to her husband, who killed him and why. I love a kick-arse main character, but I did have to roll my eyes at Jack's extraordinary ability to soldier on in the face of injury and illness to the extreme that she did.

Zero Days by Ruth Ware was an enjoyable standalone crime thriller with good pace, but didn't give me the high I experienced at the end of The Turn of the Key. As I said, I loved that book so much that it made it into my Top 5 list that year. Since then, I followed up by reading One by One (4 stars in 2020) and The It Girl (3 stars in 2022) but Zero Days hasn't captured my heart, or snatched the breath from my throat.

Have you experienced this phenomenon? I feel like a novel junkie (yep, I did just say that) chasing that first gasp of surprise and elation Ruth Ware gave me and I think I'm still chasing. Luckily for me, I have plenty from the author's back catalogue to discover, and in the meantime, I hope Ruth Ware is given carte blanche to write her heart's desire, free from pressure so that she can steal our hearts once more.

* Copy courtesy of Simon & Schuster * show less

I love a good, fast-paced thriller and this book showed a lot of promise. In the opening few pages, the heroine — a woman known as “Jack” — returns home from a dangerous assignment (she does physical checks of security for companies, involving illegal break-ins) to find her husband murdered. And she quickly becomes the prime — indeed, only — suspect. And makes a run for it. With echoes of 1930s thrillers like John Buchan’s The Thirty Nine Steps she even has to jump from a moving train at one point. But there were three things I didn’t like about the book. First, the internal monologue, which is quite repetitive, focussing on how much she misses her dead husband. That significantly padded out the story and I though show more unnecessarily so. The second two gripes involve a SPOILER ALERT: if you’ve ever seen the movie Ghost with Demi Moore, you may remember her beloved murdered husband and his best friend, the slimy Carl Bruner. A character appears here and I immediately thought — please don’t go there. But the author did. But the worst part was to follow. In the end, as you can imagine, good triumphs (no spoiler there) and our heroine is recuperating in hospital. But with her beloved husband gone, she sees no point in living. After all, what can a woman alone do with her life? And then I worried that the author would slip in some handsome doctor and she’d fall into his arms. But no, this is 2023, authors don’t do that kind of nonsense any more. Instead, Jack finds meaning and a reason to live because, as we discover, she is … with child. The utterly backward and reactionary nature of the story was really quite a shock to me. As if a talented, educated, witty woman can only find meaning in life through her amazing husband or a child. I may be unfair, but those things ruined an otherwise interesting book for me. show less

You know that feeling you get when you begin a book and you just know it’s going to be amazing? This is that book. This is a Ruth Ware as I’ve never seen her before, a Ware, 5.0 version if you will, launching this masterful author onto another level of greatness. Jack’s story starts with a bang and the nonstop action, surprises and revelations keep going through to the bitter end. I was intrigued, educated and invested with each and every chapter, and ended up yelling at Jack more than once as some of the situations she found herself in were heart stopping. Zero Days is Ware at her best, and her others are hard to top!
*I received an arc from the publisher through NetGalley for an honest review

Although I loved this book, I can understand the disappointment voiced by some of my less enthusiastic GR Friends. Yes, sometimes Ms. Ware can be tedious and repetitious, which can be frustrating and boring. The It Girl is probably the best and most recent example and would have benefited from having all the excess excesses excised and exorcised (LOL), and I nearly threw my Kindle at my blameless wall when the MC in The Lying Game said for the gazillianth time that she had to breastfeed the baby! Come on! I got the picture that she was a new mother, and obsessed, the first hundred times she said it!

So, I came perilously close to abandoning ship after a tag-along tour through the MC's (Jack's) exhausting security breach testing, show more excruciatingly long description of a murder scene, and elephant in a china store contamination of a crime scene when, suddenly, something beautiful happened...Jack, who was being questioned as a person of interest in a murder investigation, waltzed out of the police station while no one was watching and, BOOM, the chase was on, and didn't let up until almost the very last pages of the book!

I think Ruth Ware excels in "the chase" and this book did not disappoint. Jack's ability to elude her would-be captors was breathtaking, reminiscent of the final chase in The Woman in Cabin Ten and One by One. One close call followed another for the major portion of the book, grabbing me by the throat and keeping me rivetted through to the grand finale. There is an unnecessary epilogue (one of my pet peeves). I didn’t feel that any loose ends needed to be tied up in Zero Days, but then loose ends don’t frazzle me (hehehe). I generally don’t care what happens to the characters after the plot ends unless the author wants to plant a bomb and completely change the perspective as in The Handmaid Tale or Ware’s own Turn of the Key.

Mini-spoiler comment here Need I mention the folly of communicating by text in lieu of voice? This device has been used too often lately.

I read and listened. Imogen Church’s narration was pitch perfect, as it is in all of Ware’s novels. show less

Jack and her husband, Gabe, are pen testers - they are hired by companies to try and break into their systems, penetrating their defenses, so that they can identify and fix any weaknesses. After one late night job Jack returns home to find her husband murdered. Despite cooperating with authorities, they quickly identify her as their prime suspect. Jack is determined to find the real killer and goes on the run, using all her skills to evade capture while tracking down all the evidence she can. But who would have wanted to kill Gabe? He had no enemies, and he never did any jobs Jack wasn't a part of - did he?

I'm a software engineer so I always find cybersecurity thrillers, and other fiction set in that space, to be fun. The author based a show more lot of this on actual stories and interviews with real pen testers, and it shows. There were a few places I felt like the plot reached just a bit, but nothing egregious that pulls you out of the story. I didn't intend to finish this book in one day, but it was gripping and super fast paced and I couldn't put it down. If you enjoy "The Fugitive" I think this is something right up your alley. I haven't read too much of Ruth Ware, but I can already tell she has a distinctive style, so fans of her other work will probably like this as well, despite it being a shift from her usual genre.

This was a great one-off thriller/mystery and as long as you like the 'searching for justice while wrongly accused and on the run' trope, set in a cybersecurity framework, then I don't think you'll be disappointed with this one. show less