The It Girl by Ruth Ware (2022) It's a tribute to Ruth Ware's loyal fan readership that this book managed to park itself on the New York Times bestseller list.
True enough, her solutions and revelations about the book's murder are Agatha Christie-worthy.......I've no doubt Dame Agatha would approve.
Getting there is the problem. 85 per cent of "The It Girl" is a tiresome back-and-forth slog through past and present timelines.
A familiar set up.....5 first year Oxford university students, Hannah, April, Will, Hugh, Ryan and Emily.....golden girl, wild child, bitch goddess April ends up murdered. The surviving friends (including our main gal here Hannah) all have solid alibis.....more or less.
The most likely suspect: Neville, a creepy, vaguely threatening porter takes the fall for the crime, since he's the only one Hannah saw come out of the dorm just before April took the enforced dirt nap.
Years later, still proclaiming his innocence, Neville dies in prison. Now married to Will, Hannah's traumatized by a journalist who presents her with new theories that Neville was indeed falsely convicted. Despite Will's anger and anguish, a pregnant Hannah throws herself into her own amateur investigation.....leading to.....ha ha, not on this blog......
When Ware finally drags the story across the finish line, it's a clever stunner alright, but along the way she commits the most heinous, cardinal sin that mystery-thriller writers can inflict on a reader.
Pages and pages and pages on Hannah's internal musings, suspicions, fears about who did it, who didn't do it, who might have done it, whose alibi's still tight, whose alibi's wobbly......on and on and on....blah, blah, blah, blah.
Authors who perpetrate this crime, who fall down the internal thoughts rabbit hole and hardly come up for air, should realize the risk involved.
The risk that we readers will give up staying pinned to the pages and just start skimming through all that repetitive blather so we can get to the good stuff. You know.....who killed who, who did what....and why.
The Ruth Ware faithful must be lovin' it, though.
I didn't all that much. 2 stars (**).
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