Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - One Perfect Couple: Der New-York-Times-Bestseller | »Köstlich düster und absolut fesselnd.« LUCY FOLEY

Spice Rating: 🫑 / 5 🌶️

Ruth Ware's books are usually hit or miss for me, but One Perfect Couple fell pretty squarely in the middle of the road.

Lyla has been doing post-doctoral research for years now, and she doesn't know where her career is going to go from here. So when her boyfriend and aspiring actor, Nico, suggests the two of them enter a reality TV competition called "The Perfect Couple," Lyla decides to take the leap and try out. The two of them are swept away to a remote island to participate with four other couples, but from the get go, the process and the show itself seem sort of... suspicious. It doesn't take long for things to outright start going wrong, and soon enough, the group is cut off from the rest of the world with not much hope for escape or help. They have to survive together before they all die from dehydration, starvation, or something much worse.

I thought the concept behind this novel was quite intriguing, and I always love a good Agatha Christie-esque story. The story took a while to take off, but in the last 25% of the novel, I was on the edge of my seat. Though One Perfect Couple was somewhat predictable, it still had a decent plot with character traits I don't usually see in thriller novels.

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

This book was an absolute disaster. Maybe I've just been lucky and read some great thrillers, but honestly I don't think this book should be able to be classified as a thriller. The premise was intriguing enough: 5 couples get dropped off on a dreamy tropical island to compete against each other in a reality TV show, but a massive storm sweeps through the island and turns the competition into a fight for survival. Who wouldn't be interested? I was hoping for mystery and psychological suspense (as promised in the book's description) but instead got a highly predictable rip-off of Lord of the Flies with a cast of instagram influencers. (The fact that LOTF, a classic novel, even gets referenced during the climax of the manufactured "tension" really set me off...).
There's so much wrong with this book that it's difficult to know where to start. The characters were all shallow caricature's of what the author assumes that Gen Z/millennial influencers are. She posits our "main character," Lyla, as the "brains" of the book since she's a postdoc scientific researcher, but Lyla ends up being just as superficial and helpless as the rest of the women. Though the book picked up pace towards the middle/end (and mercifully put us out of the misery of the first 30% which was slow as molasses), at no point was I gripped or desperate to know what happened next. I was waiting for the twist that literally never came. If the reveal that happens around 90% of the way in is Ruth Ware's idea of a "twist," I am so glad that I have never picked up her other novels. By the end I literally felt like I had wasted all the hours I put into reading this.
The only reason it gets 2 stars instead of 1 is that there was some semi-intriguing moments of tension throughout, and I was invested in a few characters and their survival by the end. The writing wasn't terrible, I just wish that the plot was more fleshed out in a way that was at least semi-believable.

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