Thank you, net galley, for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. This one kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time! I really enjoyed the dual timelines and the reality show premise. This was a true to form thriller and kept me guessing the entire time. I really enjoyed many of Ruth Ware's previous novels, and will be recommending this one also.

This book was so terrifying, being stranded on a tiny island, dealing with medicine possibly running out, reality show contestants and a killer.

I really enjoyed this book and once I started it, I couldn't put it down. I loved the mix of reality tv, survival and mystery.

In my opinion, this book is definitely better than The Woman in Cabin 10! The characters here are far more enjoyable, and the plot is well-constructed and engaging. Ruth’s writing tends to have a slower pace compared to most thrillers, so you might need to push through the initial pages to reach the heart of the story. However, once you get to the middle, the narrative becomes incredibly absorbing, turning into a binge-worthy, fast-paced read. The ending is satisfying, tying everything up nicely, and the final page even had me tearing up. If you enjoy a slower-paced, slasher-type thriller, I highly recommend this one!

I’ve read and enjoyed several of Ruth Ware’s books, and while she’s not quite an auto-buy I am happy to see a new release from her and had no qualms about picking this one up based on the blurb:

A high-tension and ingenious thriller following five couples trapped on a storm-swept island as a killer stalks among them.

Lyla is in a bit of a rut. Her post-doctoral research has fizzled out, she’s pretty sure they won’t extend her contract, and things with her boyfriend, Nico, an aspiring actor, aren’t going great. When the opportunity arises for Nico to join the cast of a new reality TV show, The Perfect Couple, she decides to try out with him. A whirlwind audition process later, Lyla find herself whisked off to a tropical paradise with Nico, boating through the Indian Ocean towards Ever After Island, where the two of them will compete against four other couples—Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana—in order to win a cash prize.

But not long after they arrive on the deserted island, things start to go wrong. After the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival. As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla finds that this game show is all too real—and the stakes are life or death.

A fast-paced, spellbinding thriller rife with intrigue and characters that feel so true to life, this novel proves yet again that Ruth Ware is the queen of psychological suspense.

I wasn’t sure about the reality show setting – I’m a bit of a reality tv aficionado (judge away!), though to be honest relationship shows aren’t my main interest. The only season of The Bachelor I watched (of many, many available) was the one where the British guy (think Wish-version Hugh Grant) got engaged to Lorenzo Lamas’ daughter (spoiler: it didn’t work out).

Anyway, knowing a bit about reality tv made me wonder if some of the details would feel off to me, but Ware did a fairly decent job, I thought. There were a few bits that I didn’t buy, but some of it is explained away by the suggestion that the show is being done on spec (I think that’s the phrase) with the hopes of finding a buyer. I just suspended my disbelief and went with it.

Lyla is definitely a fish out of water amongst the other contestants – more girl next door than femme fatale, and a scientist rather than Instagram model. Her boyfriend Nico is much more the type you’d imagine on a show like this, and also much more jazzed about being on it (the blurb makes it sound like Lyla chooses to audition, but really she is heavily pressured by Nico, who is sure it’ll be his big break). Lyla finally reluctantly agrees to the trip. She doesn’t evince much concern about appearing on television, at least not for the reasons that I would have. But again – disbelief suspended.

The contestants are transported via yacht to the luxury island they’ll be filming on. On the yacht the couples meet each other, size the others up, and almost revolt when they find out totally unexpectedly that their electronics are all being confiscated for the duration (disbelief….sigh; I really feel like they should have figured that out way earlier).

The first day starts with an exercise in how well you know your partner, and chaos erupts when an unexpected contestant is abruptly eliminated. Lyla ends up “winning” and her reward is a night’s stay in the special winner’s suite with Joel, the male winner. Lyla and Joel previously had bonded lightly on the yacht as the two academics in a cast of models and influencers.

Important (and perhaps unrealistic, though I don’t know enough about the behind-the-scenes part of reality tv to say) detail: the contestants are left on the island with only one PA babysitting them while the crew and the producer (a shady character named Baz) head back on the yacht to drop off their eliminated contestant on the mainland. There are supposedly cameras in all the lodgings, so I guess they figure they won’t miss any drama that way. It felt odd to me, though.

Lyla wakes in the middle of the night to a terrific storm, a storm that ends up knocking out communications and isolating the contestants – they are effectively marooned.

Two people are found dead on the island as a result of the storm. Also, there is real concern about what may have happened to the yacht out on the open ocean, and apparently no one has reason to believe that things were organized in an above-board enough manner that they’ll be rescued anytime soon, or that the outside world knows where they are. The group immediately begins organizing to ration their meager available food and water.

I’ve seen comparisons between One Perfect Couple and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but what follows feels more like a twisted version of Lord of the Flies (not that LotF is not twisted enough). It’s not really suspense of the kind I usually read or necessarily expected based on the Ware books I have read.

Which is not a bad thing! I was just expecting more mystery, but the villain (villains? maybe one villain and one villain jr.) is made clear fairly early on. Further, the deaths that follow are not very mysterious either – the first death (after the initial two from the storm) actually takes place in full view of everyone, and leaves most of the castaways unsettled but ambivalent about how to proceed. They are interested in surviving, and if that means not rocking the boat, they’ll keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

As tensions rise and the food and water start to run low, Lyla bonds with some of the other women, but other contestants are isolating themselves and one quickly evolves (devolves?) from “leader” to “tyrant.”

Back to my expectations for a moment – for the longest time I was expecting a twist, and I thought I knew what it might be. That twist didn’t materialize, and the actual twist was a lot more subtle. I wonder if the suspense/thriller/mystery is unique in having these…sort of the expectation that the reader will be trying to figure out the ending as they read? Certainly, romance is different in that the expectation is a HEA, and the details often aren’t something that I, at least, as a reader, are anticipating or trying to guess ahead of time, at least not to any great degree. General fiction, on the other hand, is a bit too much of a crapshoot for me to read that way, but mysteries and thrillers INVITE the reader to try to guess what might happen and how it all might resolve itself.

So for me at least, there’s a bit of a distraction that can happen when you’re trying to pick up clues that your theory is correct – you are perceiving events a particular way in support of that theory. In the case of One Perfect Couple, there was the fact that the plot was not what I expected, and that even after I realized that I was sort of trying to fit a conventional thriller framework onto it, and that affected how I read it (incomplete reading of the blurb is partly to blame here, and I’ve come to realize that I do that often – either don’t carefully read the blurb or don’t retain the information it includes, and so I end up expecting something different from what the blurb actually told me was going to happen).

I’m not sure why I’m belaboring this so much – I think I’m trying to figure out out if/how all this affected my enjoyment of the book. I did like it – Ware is a strong writer and if Lyla wasn’t the most compelling protagonist, she was sympathetic enough, and proved to be both smart and tough as the story went on. I can’t quite shake the feeling that I wanted a slightly different story than the one I got, but I am fully clear that that’s on me, and does not reflect on the author at all.

(One other issue that was mostly a plus but maybe a bit of a minus? – the villain is detestable. I admire how detestable the villain is and how realistically it’s portrayed. But the visceral ick the villain gave me maybe affected how I felt about the story somewhat.)

I think I’ll give The Perfect Couple a B – even more than usual this is a reflection on many disparate feelings I had about the book. Still looking forward to Ware’s next book.

A compulsively good book! Well-written. The characters were intriguing and somewhat hard to figure out. I never really knew who the killer was. There was a nice twist at the end, but nothing to intense.

3.5⭐️
- I enjoyed the idea of a reality tv show that was part Love Island part Survivor
- I enjoyed the setting of the island
- There were a lot of characters to learn at the beginning, but I didn’t find it too hard to keep track
- I liked how the mayday calls were included at the beginning to build suspense
- I liked how the relationships changed as their time on the island increased
- MC was easy to root for


- I wish we had a bigger twist. I enjoyed the story, but was left wanting a bit more at the end.
- I feel like some of the characters very abruptly changed from how they acted at the beginning. Not in a “oh this is a twist” but more just an unnatural change of character

I love Ruth Ware's books! This one had me on the edge of my seat the whole time (typically for Ware's books). The dynamics between all of the couples was really interesting to read about. The pace of the book and how everything unfolded meant it was super engaging, I didn't want to put it down! I think this book is an excellent addition to her oeuvre. Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for this ARC!

This is now the second "reality show gone horribly wrong" thriller I've read (following Blair Braverman's Small Game), and as a sub-subgenre, its got potential.

This one is completely different from Braverman's -- if anything I'd compare it to Laymon's Island (albeit a lot better and less filled with SA). At it's core, in spite of some of the straightforwardness of the main plot, it pulls of two brilliant twists (and as a longtime Ware fan, well-hidden twists aren't always her thing). The plot is pretty simple: Five couples go to a remote tropical island for a reality show. The first night there, after most of the crew have departed, a huge storm hits, devastating the island and taking out the ship with the crew. The survivors are left to fend for themselves, but of course, things start to go south, as it seems at least one person may have a hidden agenda.

Straightforward as that plot is, Ware not only throws in some nice twists, but also does a great job of building up the characters, making them all feel like real people. We also start to get a different point of view (often a contradictory one) from Lyla (our narrator) that adds narrative tension as the story progresses and there are fewer and fewer survivors. I genuinely did not expect the way this was reconciled.

As always, Ware's a fun, breezy writer, and this is a quick and engaging read. She shifts thriller subgenres with ease, and I'm looking forward to her next one.

This is my second Ware title and honestly I enjoyed the other much better. Zero Days was face paced and I wanted to know the why. But this title I don't care about these characters at all. One feels to desperate, the other can't stand on her own decisions.
I was excited to get started because I do enjoy a good mystery. This did disappoint a little but I'm glad I read it.
I rated this 3 stars for the following reasons: for my reading style this was too wordy and it took too long for things to start, characters can get confusing two had names that was so close I had to keep going back to keep it straight in my head

I had a hard time caring for a few of the characters and kept wondering do we need six characters? All in all, it’s a summer mystery.

I just found this to be a fun time. Coming from someone who does love survivor and both love island this was a great combination of the two about what goes wrong with reality tv

5 couples apply to go to an island for a survivor type show. Lyle who is struggling with her post-doc degree, goes to support her boyfriend Nico who is trying to launch his acting career. But things don't go as planned on this Indonesian island for the five couples.
Part Lord of the Flies theme, a bit of "Then there were none" and based on "Survivor" tv show, this book keeps you reading and guessing. A few twists and some colorful characters to make it an enjoyable read.

I must admit that I had a hard time getting into this book. I put down several times but kept trying to get into it. Once it picked up it was very hard to put down. This author Ruth Ware has a knack for crafting thrilling tales, and this one is no exception, even though her big twist at the end was missing.

The story revolves around a fascinating couple: Lyla, and Nico and Nico pressure Lyla to joining a reality to join a reality TV show with him, she reluctantly agrees, thinking a couple of weeks off work won't hurt.

They are now on a very remote island with all kinds of cast members. When a storm hits the island the deaths start hitting.

Lyla quickly realizes she can't trust anyone. She has to rely on her wits to piece together the clues and stay alive. The characters in this book are well developed and the book keeps your wondering what will happen next. Such a great book and I am so glad that I finished it. Thank you #NetGalley for the ARC.

2-stars One Perfect Couple – by Ruth Ware:

This book was very slow and did not pick up speed until about 75% into it. The author did a fabulous job of making you dislike the characters, especially the antagonist, but there was no big surprise or reveal? Several times I had to just get up and get away from the book to process what was going on with the characters and only continued to read in order to find the great twist but was left highly disappointed. I found the book sad without a thrill, which is just truly sad. I am not a fan of reality TV anyway, so I initially had trouble connecting with the characters and the setting. The story definitely read like a locked room mystery without the mystery. One of the most disappointing books I’ve read in years.

Thank you to Scout Press and Simon Audio for the copies to review!

This was another hit by Ruth Ware for me, I’m loving the locked room thrillers lately and this one had a reality show element that really worked well. Set on a deserted island, five couples are trapped with a killer among them after a storm comes through overnight and takes an already tense situation up ten notches. This was very fast paced, was not too far fetched, and I was definitely captivated the entire time with the story. The audio was a great companion, it really added to the tense atmosphere that was building. The ending was extremely satisfying and I definitely recommend this one!

One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware is exactly what we have come to expect from Ruth Ware - a fun thriller with killer twists! This one is set amidst a reality competition show on an island and then bodies start dropping! Everything you want from a mystery thriller suspense novel - absolute page turner!

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance ecopy of this title. Lyla is a scientist whose boyfriend, Nico persuades her to participate in a reality show featuring couples on an island near Indonesia. When a storm hits, power and communications are knocked out, and the remaining contestants face a "Lord of the Flies" type situation. Highly riveting!

I was excited when I heard the plot of Ruth Ware's latest, as I love reality TV, and the concept of the show was interesting to me. Unfortunately, we really didn't get much of the actual TV show in the plot, as the "thriller" part of the novel began the same night that the filming started. Because of this, I felt quite a bit of distance from the characters. Since the action was ramped up so early on, it was a book that I read fairly quickly, which I also enjoyed. The ending was a bit of a letdown, as I would have liked to see more recourse brought against the perpetrator (but such is life!). Overall, I enjoyed the reading experience, but I don't think it's a book that I will remember or think about much in the future.

It has been awhile since I have read a thriller. One Perfect Couple is set up like what you would expect a reality show is really like behind the scenes. It did take some time for me to become familiar with the characters as there were many to keep up with at first. Once things start rolling, I could not put this one down. Lyla is a smart and fierce protagonist. I would not be surprised to see this one turned into a movie or short series on a streaming platform. I am recommending to all readers who enjoy a thriller. Especially for readers who enjoy a thriller that is not typical political or missing person type of storyline.

What happens when 5 couples are stranded on a private island while filming a reality TV show? Well murder...duh.

I think game show thrillers are becoming my new favorite trope! I recently read one a few weeks before I started this one and was hooked. I was positive Ruth wasn't going to let us down and SHE DIDN'T. Each contestants handed over all electronic devices upon arriving at the island and have no connected to the mainland. After filming for the day 99% of the staff take the boat back to the mainland while the contestants stay on the island. A tropical storm hits the island and destroys everything. The contestants are then faced with injury, little supplies, dehydration, starvation, and deadly alliances. Turning into survival of the fittest.

I binged this in two days!! I couldn't put it down. Every chapter left me wanting more; especially with those journal entries from one of the contestants. NICE TOUCH. There are multiple characters but don't fear, everything is in Lyla's POV so it becomes easier after a bit annnnnnd once they start dying you don't need to remember their names as much LOL. Overall, definitely an entering thriller! A must read pool/beach read for sure.