Never has there been a more perfect time to read a “locked room mystery” than in 2020. This summer, while holed up in my house during lockdown, I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of Ruth Ware’s chilling new mystery, ONE BY ONE—a book that puts a fresh, modern spin on the classic crime fiction “locked room” structure. The premise of Ware’s newest: a group of employees on a corporate retreat to a picturesque ski lodge in the French Alps find their getaway horribly disrupted when an avalanche cuts off their access to the outside world. In the claustrophobic confinement of the lodge, the group finds tempers rising, personalities clashing, and long-buried secrets threatening to reappear. Confined spaces and isolation, you say? If that doesn’t sound like 2020, I don’t know what does. Now, (thankfully!) my lockdown experience has been nowhere near as dramatic and sinister as the experiences of Ware’s ill-fated characters in ONE BY ONE, but if there ever were a moment when a “locked room mystery” rang especially true for me… this year is it. Ruth Ware’s newest suspense offering delivers a deliciously dark and dramatic tale of a group of individuals whose egos, secrets, and personal motivations clash in sinister and deadly ways when they find themselves isolated in close quarters with one another. Replete with red herrings a plenty, multiple narrators who will keep you on your toes, and an ever-intensifying sense of dread, ONE BY ONE is another outstanding crime novel from the writer who has rightfully been dubbed a modern-day Agatha Christie.