Zero Days by Ruth Ware (2023) had a cover review and interview with the author earlier this year in my favorite place to find recommendations: BookPage. I was completely intrigued by the idea of a penetration tester on the run and having to use her skills to save herself.
Jacintha (Jack) Cross and her husband, Gabe, have their own security firm in London, where they are hired to try phishing and social engineering schemes to determine how secure a company’s safeguards are. Jack is the on-site person, wheedling her way past security guards, climbing fences, and picking locks to get into server rooms, while Gabe is the white hat hacker, always in Jack’s bluetooth earpiece, watching out for her after having hacked into security systems, and telling her “you got this” when she gets into a tight space.
Until he’s not. After a routine job goes wrong, and Jack has to spend the night at a police station explaining that they were hired to break in, and encountering her creepy cop ex-boyfriend, she gets home in the wee hours of the morning to find Gabe murdered, while sitting at his computer.
Distraught and exhausted, Jack cooperates with the detectives, but soon finds herself the target of the investigation, and discovers she is being set up to take the fall for Gabe’s murder. Horrified, she goes on the run, but she’s not sure who she can trust. She knows she can trust her sister, Pen, a journalist, and Gabe’s best friend Cole told her he would do anything to help her. But she doesn’t want to put either of them at risk. So she’s on her own in London, the city with the most closed-circuit cameras in the world. She can’t use her phone because the police have it, and they’d be able to track her instantly if she did.
I loved this book–I loved Jack’s resilience, although her grief was difficult to bear at times, as it was all-encompassing. I loved the twists, and the peek into the world of technology and digital spying. It was a non-stop thriller, as Jack’s situation goes from bad to worse as she tries to investigate Gabe’s murder–she knows that the police won’t do any more investigating since they think she’s the one who did it.
I can’t consider it fat positive because there were no fat characters, but I will highlight one passage I recall in the beginning of the book where Jack is thinking about why she goes to the gym–it’s because of the physical nature of her job and having to climb things and outrun security guards–not because Gabe cares about how she looks. And Gabe is described as a big guy–I wouldn’t be surprised if he was fat–but it’s not clear either way. But these things are enough to consider it weight-neutral.
Highly recommend if you want a fast-paced thriller set in today’s tech world!
Reading While Fat 