In a Dark, Dark Wood

In a Dark, Dark Wood is a psychological thriller by the British writer Ruth Ware, published in 2015. It opens with a woman in hospital and works backwards to the weekend that put her there.

Leonora Shaw writes about crime and lives quietly in London, and she has not spoken to her childhood friend Clare for ten years. The invitation to Clare's hen party takes her by surprise, and she agrees to go, travelling with another friend from school, Nina, to a modernist glass house in Kielder Forest.

The house has one landline telephone, an unreliable mobile signal and a shotgun loaded with blanks for frightening off rabbits. Among the guests are Flo, who is Clare's closest friend, and Clare's other friends Melanie and Tom. During the weekend Clare tells Nora that she is marrying James, the boyfriend Nora had at school, a relationship that ended when they were sixteen. The novel moves between the hospital and the house in the woods as Nora tries to recover what she cannot remember.