Lyla is a frustrated virologist in a relationship with an equally frustrated aspiring actor — so when Nico tells her they’ve been invited to join a new reality show called One Perfect Couple, she hesitantly accepts. A reality TV show doesn’t seem like the ideal way to shore up a struggling relationship, but a tropical island is a tropical island. Unfortunately, tropical islands have tropical storms, and one strikes the island as soon as the filming begins — destroying many of the island’s buildings and killing one of the contestants. Lyla and the others radio for help, but the device remains silent and the horizon empty of any rescuing ships — and as the days pass, desperation begins to sink in, with flaring tempers and the occasional death. Death? Yeahhhhh, there’s a murderer loose on the island.

I picked this up after having read and enjoyed Zero Days: I was told it was atypical for Ware’s other work, being a technical thriller, and wanted to see what her ‘usual’ stuff was like. If this is it, definitely expect more Ware, because I devoured it in only a few sittings. One Perfect Couple sets the stage with an interesting main character, a scientist whose job details are drawn directly from Ware’s husband’s. The tension quickly builds as Lyla and Nico get involved with the show, and the reader realizes that the organizers really don’t have a solid operation here: the crew is small, the equipment shoddy. The drama quickly ramps up when the storm hits and everything goes to hell, and before the sheer-surival panic has even lost its strength, things start going wrong and only one of the survivors can be the culprit. One Perfect Couple definitely succeeds at keeping good tension: the characters were generally sharp, at least the women — the men, save one, are fairly forgettable. Of course, given that Lyla spends more time with the female characters, they do get more space to grow. The one limitation is the villain, who is steadily telegraphed throughout the novel, to the point that the mystery is not in who the baddy is, but how to overcome them: it takes Lyla and the others to admit the obvious thing staring them in the face. The reality show setting was new for me, as I’ve only ever read nonfiction (and purely about Survivor) on the subject. All told, I enjoyed this enormously and will be reading more of Ware — The Turn of the Key, with a smarthome murder, seems a promising prospect.