Book Review: In a Dark, Dark Wood

Spoilers!

Best not to go to a hen do — the British version of a bachelorette party — when you don’t even like the bride, and upon later learning who the groom is, staying. But certainly best not to sip the tea provided by the murderer of the story! Alas, Leonora, who goes by Nora now and not Lee as she did in her previous life, can be forgiven for the latter transgression at least, because she was recovering from a knock on the head from a car crash. Ruth Ware, in her 2015 debut book, In a Dark, Dark Wood, channels Agatha Christie to bring a fun suspense story with a modern take.

Nora joins her friend, Nina, at the aforementioned hen do, along with people she doesn’t know, Tom, Melanie, Flo, and the bride-to-be, Clare, who was Nora’s best friend growing up but they haven’t seen each other in 10 years. Except, oddly, the hen do is set at Flo’s aunt’s house in the middle of nowhere in a glass house. Forget the obvious metaphor about not throwing stones at a glass house, and instead, look again at the surroundings. They are surrounded by the “dark, dark wood” in the throes of a November winter. The image of the bare, ominous trees looming over the glass house, bearing witness to what takes place, is what makes Ware’s book such a roaring success of atmosphere and tension. That ominous feeling is always there in the background, never mind the tension between all of the characters, like everyone and Flo, because Flo is stubbornly, if a bit obsessively, trying to ensure the hen do goes off without a hitch. Or Melanie, the luckiest character in the book, who is distracted because for the first time, she’s away from her new baby, and leaves early.

Then, of course, there’s Nora’s tension, who finds out that Clare is marrying James Cooper, her former high school sweetheart, who she also hasn’t talked to in 10 years. We later learn that Nora and James broke up when Nora found out she was pregnant with his baby. Instead of discussing the matter, James sent a text breaking up with her and telling her to deal with the baby situation on her own. Nora had an abortion and left the area. We never do learn why Nora and Clare were estranged, but maybe it’s a matter of Nora having left the area.

Just as one text set in motion the next 10 years of Nora’s life, another series of texts sets the stage — a fun play on words since James and Tom are both in theatre — for the events that unfurl in the book. To set Nora up, someone texts James from her phone pleading for him to come to the glass house. James comes. But by that point, everyone’s on edge, thinking someone’s been lurking around the house. Not to mention, there’s a literal Chekhov’s gun in the house, which Ware references — a gun that is said to be filled with blanks, but not shockingly, is loaded with real ammo by the murderer. So, when James arrives at the glass house, he’s mistaken for an intruder and shot with said gun by Flo.

He likely would’ve survived the gunshot, but Clare, who is the one who set everything in motion with the texts to kill James, ensured he wouldn’t make it to the hospital in time and when Nora tried to intervene in the car, Clare crashed them into a tree. That’s why the book is interspersed and then fully finishes with Clare in the hospital trying to piece together what happened on the last night of the hen do and whether she really is culpable for James’ death.

Clare, as it turns out, was also behind the text from 10 years ago pretending to be James so she could have him. On the precipice of their marriage, when they ostensibly wanted all their secrets out in the open, James was aghast to learn this, and their not even official marriage was already on the rocks. That’s when Clare decided to kill him, and for kicks, to set Nora up for it.

At the end of the novel, Nora and Clare are back at the glass house in a nice form of bookending (heh), and that’s where Clare offers Nora some tea. But at this point, Nora suspects Clare of being the killer! And she doesn’t even like tea! Nonetheless, Nora escapes and a police detective saves her from Clare.

I’m just glad the killer wasn’t Flo because that was the most obvious red herring, and I think Ware was intentional with that because she alluded to Flo being like the woman in Single White Female. It’s also surprising that Melanie never showed back up in any capacity after leaving to return home to her baby. She was like the anti-Chekhov’s gun because normally when a character leaves the stage, as it were, in a suspense book, they return one way or another. And I’m also glad the killer wasn’t Nina because that means her friendship with Nora remains untainted. She was a good friend throughout, notwithstanding one snide remark while they were drinking.

Finally, I think Nora, who intentionally excluded herself from family and friends after her James experience for 10 years, through the ordeal with Clare and James’ death, learns that the solitary lifestyle of the writer isn’t a lifestyle she necessarily needs to extend to every facet of her life. At one point, when Melanie was showing off pictures of her baby, Nora thinks, “God knows, I don’t want a baby, but there’s something about seeing someone else’s happy family unit that feels excluding, even when it’s not meant to be.” That resonated with me, as someone without kids or a significant other, because there is a natural exclusion that occurs, again, even if unintentional. I wonder if it goes in the other direction, too, where those with families get wistful about the person without?

For a debut book, and my “debut with” Ware, I thought A Dark, Dark Wood was a good start and showed Ware has a few atmospheric and ominous tricks up her sleeve. If you can nail the atmosphere, as she did, that’s half the battle, in my estimation! I look forward to reading more of her work.