Book review: Zero Days is a perfectly thrilling beach read

Zero Days  

By Ruth Ware
Fiction/Simon & Schuster/Paperback/339 pages/$18.14/Amazon SG (

amzn.to/450Kg4N

)
4 stars

Zero Days is the perfect beach read. Smart and zippy without being too brain bending, it is a classic Ruth Ware offering for the season. 

The story opens with protagonist Jacintha “Jack” Cross breaking and entering an office building with the aid of her hacker husband Gabe.

It soon transpires that Jack is a “pen tester”, short for penetration tester, while Gabe is a white hat hacker. The duo run a small business testing companies’ physical and digital security systems. 

What is supposed to be an ordinary work day takes an unexpected turn when Jack gets detained at a police station, then returns home late to the gruesome discovery of her husband’s corpse seated at his computer with his throat slashed. 

Jack soon realises that she has become the No. 1 suspect in the eyes of Detective Sergeant Habiba Malik. So, she walks out of the police station’s interrogation room and attempts to hunt down her husband’s killer herself.

This is where her skills in lock-picking, breaking and entering and assorted con-artist tricks, honed as a pen tester, come in handy. 

But those looking for a slick, easy mission can just stop right here.

Ware’s strengths as a thriller writer comes from her empathy for the common woman.

Her heroines tend to be ordinary women who tap previously unknown reservoirs of strength and resourcefulness when confronted with extraordinary situations. So Jack, despite her athleticism and adventurous spirit, is no superheroine. 

Instead, she is believably vulnerable, struggling to deal with the grief of suddenly losing a beloved partner in such a violent fashion.

Thanks to the first-person narrative, the reader gets to experience all the highs and lows of Jack’s emotional roller coaster as she goes from almost catatonic shock to desperate defiance to exhausted survival during the worst eight days of her life. 

Ware excels in the tiny details that flesh out her protagonists’ inner and outer worlds. So Jack’s free-spirited nature is expressed through her bright red hair (a tip of the pop culture hat to Tom Tykwer’s 1998 Run, Lola, Run perhaps?).

But this siren mop becomes a problem when Jack goes on the run. 

While some thrillers get bogged down in the technical details, Ware is smart enough to incorporate just enough elements of the 21st-century world – the dependence on mobile phones, the prevalence of closed-circuit cameras and the lack of digital privacy – to present Jack with multiple obstacles to overcome.  

Where Ware truly shines is in her deft ability to seed clues in the first-person narrative so that close readers can follow, even anticipate, identifying the big bad. This is an added bonus for the Type A puzzle solver, although the casual reader can just sit back and enjoy the ride.

All this and a strong female protagonist to boot. What more can a thrill-seeker ask for?

If you like this, read: A Darker Domain by Val McDermid (Harper, 2009, $14.03, Amazon SG, go to

amzn.to/44GvIrj

). A standalone story in the Karen Pirie series that makes great use of a Rashomon-style narrative to weave together two different cold cases – one of a kidnapping gone wrong and another of a missing persons report – and if you pay attention, you can solve the mystery too.