Bookmarked by Reese's book Club is presented by Apple Books.

Hi.

I'm Danielle Robe and welcome to Bookmarked.

By Reese's book Club.

Today we're talking with the queen of the modern thriller, Ruthware, And I've got a little question.

If you made your.

Living telling stories about committing the perfect crime, what would you be googling?

I mean, if I ever get investigated, I am absolutely going to prison, like forty years straight.

It's all how long would it take a body to decompose under these circumstances, and what dostage of insulin would prove fatal?

In more, you know, it's just appalling.

There's something about a murder mystery that stirs something deep in us.

I mean, how many of us were glued to our screens each week dissecting every glance and clue in the white lotus or big little lies, whether it's glamorous vacation gone wrong or a shadowy figure in a locked room.

The mystery genre taps into our obsession with secrets and power and the thrill of not knowing who to trust.

And when it comes to building that kind of tension on the page, no one does it quite like Ruth Ware.

Ruth is the modern day master of the mystery thriller, loved by millennials.

Say that three times fast.

A New York Times bestseller, she's been called the Agatha Christie of our generation, but she's truly in a league of her own.

Her psychological thrillers are so immersive that you'll forget it's the middle of the day and you're safe on the couch and nothing can hurt you.

Right.

Her latest book, The Woman in Sweet Eleven, just hit shelves last week, and it's the long awaited sequel to The Woman in Cabin Ten, which, by the way, is headed to Netflix soon.

Here's the rundown on the pair of novels.

Laura Lowe Blacklock has been through it like through it.

A decade ago, her home was broken into and then her travel assignment aboard a luxury cruise ship turned into a murder mystery.

Wrapped in a.

Near death experience, she fights and claws her way to the truth behind the disappearance of the Woman from Cabin ten.

And when we meet Miss Lowe and Sweet eleven, she's turned her trauma into a best selling book.

Kind of meta and what do you know, another luxury journalism trip falls right into her lap, but instead of the open seas, she's now surrounded by opulence in a glittering Swiss chateau with very very dark secrets and maybe even a ghost from her past.

In today's episode, we're diving into the magic of what it takes to craft the perfect murder mystery.

And for someone who traffics in crime, Ruth is the loveliest person in real life.

She's so charming and playful it's hard to imagine that she's responsible for some of the most wicked crime stories of our generation.

We're finding out what convinced Ruth to write her first ever sequel, how her character evolved across time and trauma, and why the scariest people aren't the ones lurking in the shadows, but the ones signing the checks.

Get ready to unlock the mystery and maybe how to commit the perfect crime.

Let's turn the page with Ruth Ware.

Ruth, Welcome to Bookmarked.

I'm so happy to have you here.

You are the queen of thrillers, and specifically psychological thrillers, and the psychological thriller that has me in a choke hold recently.

Is a specific celebrity scandal.

I don't want to name any names, but if you were to make a modern day thriller out of a real life scandal, which one would you want to write?

In all of my books, I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of the super rich, and I'm totally fascinated by the phenomenon of billionaires building these bunkers to get away from the rest of us.

And I was recent in Hawaii, and of course Mark Zuckerberg's bunker over there is like massive local gossip.

So I would love to set a thriller in a celebrities bunker, either after the end of the world has actually come, or maybe just when they think it's come.

There'll be so much juicy material of you know, the billionaires and all their entourage kind of quietly melting down in this post apocalyptic world.

That is such a fabulous answer.

I feel like one of the thriller tropes that people love is rich people behaving badly.

Absolutely.

Yeah, there's just something really fascinating about just having the level of wealth that means that you're completely untouchable.

And I think however normal people start out, you can sort of see them getting weirder and weirder and weirder, the longer and the richer they are, And it just seems to be this kind of human condition that happens to you and suddenly you're, you know, pumping yourself full of REJUVENI eating serums and drinking your son's blood and you know, going to Mars or whatever it is.

Oh, that's hilarious.

You know.

Sometimes they end up on end of the world TikTok, and I did yesterday.

They must have been overhearing me, and I saw that at Costco you can buy for sixty five dollars like enough food to last you for two.

Months, oh like literally just a pack.

Yes, do you do any end of the world prepping?

I don't do it end of the world prepping, but I am a little bit of a prepper by nature.

One of the things that I loved about our house when we bought it was that it had a pantry.

And this was the thing I was most excited about out of the whole house.

Didn't care about anything else.

I was just like, it's got a pantry.

And I love having a really well stocked pantry with like, you know, gleaming jars of preserved fruit.

And I would say, at minimum, I probably have twenty four cans of tomatoes at any one time, So I don't.

I don't think of it in terms of the end of the world, but I do.

I like to think of my as a sort of a good hostess and nurturing person.

I asked you an unhinged question and you had such a normal answer.

Oh no, I think my ardes were.

Quite unhinged as well, written down, quite a deep psychological rabbit hole of pinterest.

Perfect pantry from Ruth Ware.

I'm going to need a photo.

Absolutely.

Do you watch any thrillers on TV or film?

Are there any movies that you would consider a masterclass in suspense?

Oh?

What a good question.

I'm a TV addict.

There's absolutely no point in being snobbish about where your stories come from, whatever the medium.

If you are immersed in a gripping, moving story that I don't care where that comes from.

At the moment, I'm watching Department Q on Netflix, which is really interesting and very thriller ish.

It's got a little bit of a kind of slow horses vibe.

But in terms of film, Gone Girl, I thought was a really good film adaptation of a really a book that was incredibly difficult to adapt, and they did an incredible job of it.

It's funny because we just had Emily Henry on the show and she was obsessed with that book too.

It would just changed the game so much for thrillers, and you know, it's so playful and it's so meta, and it opened up so many possibilities of, you know, ways to tell a story.

It just felt really fun and adventurous.

I don't know if Weight Lotus is as popular in the UK as it is in America, but everybody that watches White Lotus is trying to figure out who's going to die at the end, like who will be murdered.

And as I was prepping for this interview, I was just thinking, Ruth must know who's going to die at the end of all of these TV shows.

Is there a tell for you?

I don't know.

I actually I don't always get it right.

I get it right more often in books, I think, because I'm a novelist myself, and so I see the tricks that the other writers are doing more I see how they're misdirecting.

I think I find it easier to sort of put myself in the shoes of a book writer but actually film and TV, I'm more often surprised because I think it's not a medium that I ever work in, So I'm sort of much more just a regular punter turning up and being like, Wow, this is cool premise.

What's going on?

Yeah?

No, we're pretty addicted to white Loaters over here as well.

But I have not watched the fourth season, so please no spoilers.

I won't say a thing, but it does sort of fall into your category of rich people behaving badly.

Absolutely.

One of the things I love about White Lotus and which I often returned to in my books, is the idea of a kind of a super luck setting that is also slightly nightmarish.

And I kind of very much sort of pulled that from Agatha Christie and all of her you know, like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient express settings where she creates these what seemed to be incredibly luxurious settings and then sort of turns them into a kind of gradually tightening nightmare.

And I think White Lotus does that really well as well, where you go to these incredibly enviable places and they're just filled with awful people and encroaching dead bodies.

I'm so glad you mentioned Agatha Christie because I heard in another interview that you said you always sort of wondered if she wrote Death on the Nile as an excuse to take a little trip down the Nile River.

And I'm curious if you've done the same for any of your books.

Have you ever followed any of your personal curiosities towards an exotic place or an outlandish place.

Have you ever just walked in somewhere and thought, yeah, someone should die here.

I would say I more often do it the other way around, unfortunately, which is that I write books about places that I'm intensely curious about but have never been.

And of course, my you know, ambition when I start writing is that I will go, and then it hardly ever, seems to happen.

So like The Woman in Cabin Ten, which is set on a luxurious cruise, I have still, you know, almost ten years on from that book, never been on a cruise.

And my intention while I was writing it was one hundred percent to take a cruise, write it off as a tax deduction.

Yeah.

And One Perfect Couple was sort of similar.

It's set on this sort of Maldivian island and I'd never been on a holiday like that, and I got to go to the Maldives, and I was so worried that I'd written this book and that I would have ended up making some awful mistake or something wouldn't be right.

And in actual fact, almost I changed almost nothing.

Almost everything was exactly as I had imagined it.

But I did do exactly what you were describing, and that everybody else was on this beautiful island having this incredible time, and so I sort of walked around this island all week thinking, oh, you know, if we were cut off for a few days, who would crack first?

So you just said that the Maldives were exactly how you imagined it, which is wild to me, because like, what does your search history look like?

How do you even imagine a place you haven't been when you're researching for these books?

I mean, my search history is an absolute bloody battleground.

Or I mean, if I ever get investigated, I am absolutely going to prison, like forty years straight.

It's all how long would it take a body to decompose under these circumstances, and what dosage of insulin would prove fatal?

In what you know?

It's just appalling, but I do try to intersperse it with you know, tax for writers and things, just in case someone from the government is watching.

But no, I mean I watched documentaries and you know, read things and leaved through travel brochures.

I don't find it super hard to imagine myself somewhere else.

Lots of the details that I put in were correct, but there were two that I one that I didn't think of and one that I just got wrong.

And the one that I didn't think of was I didn't realize how worn the sea was going to be.

You know, where I live in Sussex in the UK, even in the height of summer, the sea is freezing.

You walk in and you got is so cold.

And I knew that it would be warmer in the Indian Ocean, but I wasn't prepared for how warm it was.

And I do really vividly remember that shock of walking into the sea and just thinking it's like a hot top.

It's like it's really really warm.

So that went into the book, that moment where my character wades into the sea and has this shock that it's kind of it's really warm.

But the thing that I got flat out wrong was I put monkeys into the book because I wanted that kind of screech, you know that they make in the night, that sort of atmospheric sound.

And of course monkeys don't really swim, so it turns out there aren't any monkeys on those little islands.

But what there are, which is even more atmospheric, is bats, these enormous fruit bats.

So the monkeys had to go, but the bats came in to be spooky in their place.

Sort of in our hearing, you talk about the specifics and the details that you're researching, like, I can only imagine writing a page could take so long when you're researching all these details in it.

One of the reasons I've always loved books is I feel like they're a portal to a place I've never been.

But I've never considered that they're also a portal for the writer.

And now I'm hearing that from you.

It's always the smallest things that the hardest to research as well.

It's never the big things, the things that you think you know when you start writing, oh, you know, I'll need to consult somebody about that.

It's always the tiny little details, like how long would it take to get from A to B?

Or would this really small plot point be plausible?

And there's the stuff that you just don't know.

And until I went to the Maldives, it didn't occur to me that there wouldn't be monkeys, And I would never have googled that.

It hadn't occurred to me to google, do the Maldives have monkeys?

But researching is also a huge source of inspiration.

You know, I will get completely lost down Google rabbit holes and Wikipedia rabbit holes and find out just fascinating stuff that it never occurred to me to put in a book.

Not even always while I'm researching.

Often I would just be, you know, listening to a podcast or going about my day to day chatting to a friend, and they'll say something that will make me think that could be a plot point.

And I always think if I'm fascinated by something, it's hopefully a good indication that the reader might find it intriguing as well.

I'm getting sort of I don't know what the word is, but almost like sparkly thinking about your imagination.

I've always heard that as we get older, like our imagination could decrease, but it sounds like yours has just grown.

Is there anything that you do to practice it or it just comes naturally to you.

Oh, I don't know.

That's an awful idea that it might decrease.

Wow, now I'm going to feel like, is my imagination as strong as it used to be?

I think I have a super visual imagination, which is interesting because I have a number of writer friends who have that thing, which I can't remember what it's called, but it's basically where you have no visual imagination at all.

Like if someone says the word apple to you, you know the concept of an apple, but you don't picture an apple in your head, right, Whereas when I an apple, I see an apple.

So I think that really helps when I'm writing.

I literally see the scenes kind of playing out in my mind's eye, and in a way, that makes it much easier to write them, because you know, you just you're describing in a way what your imagination is providing.

It also means that I quite rarely have continuity errors and things in my books, so there's copy Editors often spent a lot of time saying she was actually on the left of the room, and now she's on the right, and she seems to have teleported, and that mostly doesn't happen for me because I'm sort of seeing it in my head.

There's something called synesthesia, which Pharrell has, where you can see colors.

I feel like we.

Need to coin a term for whatever this gift is that you have.

I think it's just a really vivid imagination.

And that's all my teachers used to say on my parents' evenings.

Whenever my mom came in, they'd be like, well, she certainly has a very vivid imagination in a way that maybe didn't sound like it was a complete But I love having a vivid imagination, and I think, you know, it's part of what makes reading so pleasurable, is just entering another world and it's so rich and exciting, and it's why I love writing as well.

You know, writing is like reading on steroids.

Well, your new book, The Woman in Sweet eleven has been out for a week now, and you've called it a love letter to everyone who wanted more, which I love.

You said you didn't plan to write a sequel, but your fans convinced you.

I'm curious why you were so hesitant to continue those stories because that book was such a hit.

I think I've always been slightly kind of hesitant of writing sequels to any of my books, and it's I suppose it's for two reasons.

One, it's sort of One's a kind of technical reason, which is, you know, I always write about just regular ordinary people.

I don't write about police officers or you know, forensic experts or whatever, and so it's quite hard to explain why a regular, ordinary person would keep encountering crimes.

You know, you sort of get that murder she wrote effect where every time Jessica Fletcher opens her front door, there's a corpse.

So part of it is just a kind of plausibility angle.

But part of it is because my characters go through so much in my books.

You know, their physical danger gets absolutely beaten to a pulp, you know, frozen, half drowned, gas lit, psychologically destroyed.

So I sort of feel at the end of it like they basically deserve a break.

And I know with most of my characters that is exactly what would happen.

They would finish the book, they would go back to their regular, ordinary lives with an enormous sigh of relief, and nothing ever happened to them again.

And I feel like I kind of ought to respect that.

But there are characters in my book who I don't feel that is true of, who would probably might not avoid danger so much as kind of run towards it.

I've written a few characters like that, people who would seek out trouble.

That's like every boyfriend I've ever had see.

I keep those characters fairly in my fiction.

But yeah, that was the genesis really of Sweet eleven.

Was a character and it's not low who would not be able or willing to stay out of trouble, but it wasn't.

It's interesting because you said my fans convinced me to write a sequel, and I don't think that was true, because people have been begging for sequels for lots of my books over the years, and I'm very selfish.

I write exactly what I wanted to write.

I think it was more they're wondering about what would happen next and what, you know, what all the characters would be up to.

Made me start to wonder and made me selfishly want to find out.

I'd say they didn't convince me so much as they lit us.

Fuck.

That's cool to hear, and I don't find it selfish.

There's actually this music producer named Rick Rubin, who wrote a book called The Creative Act that I love.

He says that in order to have great success, you have to do exactly what you are inspired and creative about.

I love that.

I'm going to type that out and put it above my desk.

You would love the book.

Yeah, it's a great book.

Ruth.

You said something that I was so inspired by.

I have to ask you to expound on it.

You said that children aren't often seen as the death of creativity, but motherhood gave you bravery, and you actually don't think you would have been published, especially your first book, had you not had kids.

That is not something we hear very often.

What did you mean by that.

Well, I think it comes back to the idea of selfish Really, I'd written for years, ever since I was a teenager.

I'd written Burke after Burke after Burke, and just I wrote them for me and I just ended up putting them under the bed at the end of the day because I kind of I couldn't bear to be rejected.

I didn't think they were good enough.

And in my twenties I went to work in the book industry, which was incredible because I got to work with all these amazing writers, but it made my kind of stage fright about writing even worse.

And then I had my second baby and I was on maternity leave, and I, you know, I was a bit more confident as a second time mum, and I just had this idea for a book that I really wanted to write, and I felt excited about getting home and writing this book.

And then I suddenly thought, as soon as I got back to work, I'm not going to have time to do this.

And I thought, the only way I'm going to be able to keep this thing that I love in my life is if I put my big girl pants on and write a book that I sub to agents and try to get a publishing deal for.

And if I can earn enough money from this book to pay for a bit of extra childcare, I can keep doing this.

It's maybe one morning a week while they're in nursery.

And that's exactly what I did.

And I sent it out to agents and it got rejected around the houses.

And if that had happened five years ago, I would crawled back into my shell and gone, well, you know, I'm clearly not good enough.

But it was that kind of use it or lose it thing where I thought, if I don't find a way to keep this thing in my life, I'm going to lose it.

And I yeah, carried on yeah, and eventually found the woman who is still my amazing agent today.

So yeah, absolutely, if I hadn't had my kids, I think it would have taken me probably much longer, if it hadn't been for that little selfish spark inside me saying no, I want to keep doing this and I have to find a way to make that happen.

Wow.

I just keep thinking necessity as the mother of invention.

That's a pretty inspiring story.

I think that's the thing.

Parenthood really pairs your life back to the bare bones of things that are important, particularly when you're kids are small and it's so all consuming.

And it was that moment when I was about to throw out my writing and I thought, no, this is essential, This is essential to who I am, and I have to keep it.

What do your kids think of what you do for a living.

Do they know that mom writes about murder?

Yes?

Yeah they do.

I grew up in a family where being a writer was such a weird, exotic thing, and they've grown up with the complete opposite.

It's just of course it's the thing that mom does, you know, every day while they're at school, and of course when we go into bookshops on holiday, I'm always peering around the corner looking to see if they've got a translation of one of my books.

That's just what you do when you're in venice or wherever.

So I think they just, yeah, they find it completely normal and frankly, very boring, as most of us find up parents.

If you were to tell an aspiring thriller author a piece of advice of like the secret sauce of a great thriller, what would you say?

What makes it amazing?

The one lesson that I took from when I was working in the book industry was that I read so many books and they were, you know, beautifully written, amazing descriptions, lyrical, poetic, but very often when I put them down, I felt no compulsion to pick them up.

And I think suspense is the opposite of that.

It's giving your readers a reason to turn the page.

It's kind of hooking them through the page with questions.

And I do an exercise where I look at the beginning of a thriller novel or a psychological thriller, and I ask the readers to look at how many questions the writer is asking and how many questions they are answering.

And a good novel will have a kind of an overlapping rhythm of questions and answers.

There isn't just the sort of big who done it question that's sort of pulling you through the novel.

There'll be lots of little mysteries, intriguing things, drop breadcrumbs of information that make you want to find out what's happening.

And there's a really good example of this in Gon Girl.

I think it's about sort of two or three chapters in and Nick is being interviewed by the police about the disappearance of his wife, and he says at the end of a chapter, almost as this complete throwaway line, he says, that was the fourth lie I had told the police.

I remember that line.

It's an electrifying moment as a reader because you're like, Okay, what are the four lies?

Why is he lying about something so trivial, and why is he lying to the police at all?

Has you got something to do with his wife?

So it's a brilliant example of a sort of a question that you're suddenly, And as soon as I read that, I was like, I'm not putting this book down until I know the answer to every one of those.

Just a really good basic tip for any thriller writere is to just check has your reader got a reason to want to read the next chapter?

Is there's something that you've given them that they must simply find out before they closed the book that night?

And should people be writing more questions than answers.

I think you need both.

For a writer, a cool thing around the corner is the most delicious feeling in the world.

Yeah.

For the reader, they don't know that something amazing is around the corner.

They just know that you've bugged a lot of questions at them that they don't know the answer to, and it can get very confusing and feel very withholding.

So I think it has to be a bit of both.

There has to be some really big questions that kind of pull you through the whole novel.

But a good writer won't keep people in suspense about everything.

They'll do a kind of a question and an answer, and a question and an answer, and there'll be a little sort of yeah, a little rhythm going on.

I like the idea of a rhythm.

When I think about an interview, I actually picture it as a song.

I think it has to crescendo and have a rhythm as well.

And so it's very cool to hear that your book feels like it has rhythm.

I love that.

I don't know if I think if it is a song, but I do have a sort of mental graph in my head of the sort of yah and troughs of how I want the book to feel, and I want it to go up at the end, and I want there to be a real sort of slough in the middle.

And yeah, every book's got a different shape, but I yeah, it's is so interesting to hear you talk about it from a kind of completely sort of nonfiction point of view.

Yeah, that's how I feel hearing you talk about it from a fiction point of view.

You know, one of the things I noticed about your books is that it seems like there's a lot of girls weekends gone wrong.

Also about nightmarish work retreats.

I think I just like putting people in horrible situations.

I'm curious what it is about these tight female friendships and suspicion that kind of makes it a fertile ground for thrillers.

Yeah, no, it's a great question.

Often in my books, I'm kind of writing against my earlier books, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

So I wrote in adut dot Wood, which was my first thriller and does center around what we call a hen party, what you guys call a bachelorette party.

Will make a hen party that's fun.

Yeah, hen party is such a weird very much as Weekend Away Gone wrong.

And then The Woman in Cabin Ten was a completely different book.

Low is on a professional trip.

It's sort of it's not that kind of toxic female dynamics sort of thing.

But I felt really guilty when the press started to come out about in Adult dot Wood and talk about, you know, this dissection of toxic female friendship.

That is not my experience of female friendship.

You know, yes, we've all had a mean girl in our lives, but by and large, my female friends are incredible.

That are some of the most important people in my life.

I have friends that I've been friends with since primary school.

And I felt incredibly guilty that I'd sort of done female friendship dirty in my first book.

And so with the Lion Game, which was the reason with the Spoon Books Club I kind of revisited the topic in a way to try and redeem what I'd said earlier.

So I created a group of incredibly close knit friends and made them, you know, the kind of ride or die friends who would give up anything for their in fact, which is the kind of the core of the book, is that they have done this.

They've done a terrible thing that they can't talk about, and it has colored the rest of their lives.

But what it hasn't spoiled is their friendship.

And of course it's a thriller, so it all goes very dark.

But I think in a lot of ways that book is my love letter to my female friends to say, you know, I'm not necessarily going to bury a body for you at midnight, but I would, you know, I would go to the ends of the earth for you.

You know, I was thinking about what you said earlier.

Actually, my first question about the billionaires, I think oftentimes in thriller or horror movies and books, the villain mirrors the social and political anxieties of the time.

During the Cold War, you get these mutated creatures.

You get mass slashers in the seventies, and for you, both of the villains.

In these books.

Are Billionaires?

Was that a conscious choice about the time we're in or are your bad guys?

A reflection and something.

I think all of my books are a reflection of kind of my personal anxieties and sort of things that I see in the world.

Yeah.

The Turn of the Key, for example, which is a novel set in this sort of nightmarish smart house where my main character is a nanny and she's been kind of constantly tormented by this tech that is just kind of get out of control.

That was inspired by reading newspaper articles about this new phenomenon of digital abuse, where you know, one partner typically has control of all of the sort of household devices, and when the relationship starts to break down, they packing into their ex's home harb, listening to their conversations, spying on them through the cameras or whatever it is.

And I'm also, you know, as someone who spends a lot of time on social media, several of my books have revolved around kind of social media and sort of you know the role that that plays in our lives.

Yeah, the amount of information that we're happy giving to tech companies kind of in exchange for a free service.

But I think.

You know, wealth inequality is one of the most pressing topics of our age, right, you know, what does it do to people to have that much money and that little accountability.

It's a really interesting question.

It is a really interesting question.

Are you ever inspired by people in your own life?

Like is there a teacher from your kids' school that sort of secretly made it into one of your novels that we wouldn't know about.

I try very hard not to ever put real people who I'm close to in my novels.

I'm not above you know, sitting in a restaurant and eavesdropping on the couple next to me and thinking, Wow, that is a weird dynamic that's going straight into a book in a couple of years.

So, Ruth, we've been talking about The Woman in Sweet eleven, but the book that started at all was The Woman in Cabin ten, and it is getting a film adaptation and Kiera Knightley is playing low.

So I know, earlier in our conversation you said you don't have a lot of experience with film or TV.

But I don't know that that's so true, because this is happening and it's an amazing casting.

I'm sure You're gonna have tons of fans flocking to see this.

How are you keeping it fresh for people who already know the ending from reading your book and sort of the easter eggs and spoilers throughout.

The answer is, I haven't had to do that.

It's someone else's problem.

It feels great to be able to sort of hand my baby over and say this is your problem, now you deal with it.

No, I mean, oh my gosh, it's been a real dream come true.

The cast is absolutely beyond my wildest dreams.

When I think they announced Kiera Knightly, first I must say to my agent, what the Kara Knightley?

And she was like, yeah, Rtha's there's only one kiir and Nightly.

And then as more and more names came out, I was just like, these people are all incredible.

So yeah, the cast is absolutely just beyond what I ever would have expected.

And the director, Simon Stone is incredible.

He did the dig which I absolutely adored.

It's a real If you have seen it, it's a really beautiful film.

So I think it's going to be incredible.

I think it doesn't matter if you've read the book, to be honest, I think it's just really interesting seeing someone else's perspective.

And I know as a reader, you know, when you go and see a film of a book that you love, it's fascinating seeing how two people can read the same book and come up with such different interpretations.

So I think that would be really fascinating people.

I spent like two days on set and it was incredible but also a real kind of snapshot.

But I just hadn't realized like how much work goes into a film.

And I know that sounds hopelessly naive when I say it, but you know, a novel, of course, there's a lot of people who help with a novel.

There's your editor, there's your designer, there's a person who makes it look beautiful.

In production, there's a sales team who get it out there.

But a film is just a whole other level.

It is literally an entire vilege of people working to make something as beautiful and as brilliant as they possibly can, and to have that thing be your book just feels like the most incredible privilege.

So yeah, I'm excited for you now.

I have to tell you, when I was reading Sweet Eleven, I was casting in my own mind, if you could cast that adaptation tomorrow.

I just need to know one thing, who would you cast as Marcus Weidman.

It's funny because I don't dreamcast my books at all.

Never, No, I really really don't.

And I think a big part of that is because I have a really visual imagination.

To me, the characters are so clearly who they are, I find it very difficult to map them onto real life people.

It's funny.

The one character who I did think about when I was writing was Marcus, and I think I mentioned in the book at one point that he has a kind of Donald Southern look to him, so that he was in my mind, and I think a big part of that was having seen him in the Hunger Games playing presidents now, and he looks very much how i'd imagine Marcus, very kind of very charming, but also very ruthless, with that sort of slight, unknowable edge of cruelty.

But yes, unfortunately he is not available.

So if anyone has any suggestions for who they were done key for, Sutherland is available.

His son, Oh so true, Yeah, exactly.

Maybe he's probably not quite old enough.

Maybe you could wear a gray wig.

Yeah, you know, you've spent your life writing these twisty, turney endings for books.

I am looking at you.

You have so many of your books on your shelves.

What has been the biggest twisted turn in your life?

Oh, one hundred percent writing in a dut dart Wood.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

You know, when I wrote that book, I don't really know what I expected, but I think I thought I was writing this kind of weird little British book, like, who on earth has ever heard of a Hen party outside of the UK?

Nobody?

And I thought, you know, I was writing this weird little thriller that you know, my friends would read and my mother in law would buy, because she's incredibly supportive and she buys all of my books.

I just had no expectations whatsoever.

Like, obviously I hoped it would do well, but I just thought, you know, we'll sell a few copies, we'll have some fun, and I'll tell the twisty story.

And then it just blew up beyond my wildest dreams.

And ironically, as I was writing The Woman in Cabin ten, which made that book incredibly hard to write, because you know, the more I was sort of struggling with this kind of twisty plot that wouldn't quite pin down, and these characters that wouldn't quite behave the way I wanted them to in adt dot Wood was just you know, it was getting amazing reviews, It was getting you know, picked up on social media.

People were saying lovely things about it.

It was hitting the best seller list, and yeah, all of that made capin ten so hard to write.

It was like blood out of a stone.

But yeah, that book changed my life in so many ways, and I've ended up going places I could never have dreamed of in my wildest imagination, which, as we have established, is pretty.

Well for anybody listening.

I'm smiling very big.

You can't see my smile, but that's really wonderful, Ruth.

I love asking our guests what they've bookmarked this week.

It's the title of our show, but it could be a weird fact, a fun quote, something that you've saved on Instagram or texted your best friend about.

For you.

I was thinking even maybe a luxury hotel or destination, because so many of those are in your books.

Is there anything that you've bookmarked this week?

My kind of well, not guilty pleasure, because I don't believe in guilty pleasures.

I think if it's giving you pleasure that I'm not hurting anyone else.

That's great, So let's not say guilty pleasure.

My pleasure is going to Spas.

I absolutely adore going to Spas.

And actually there's a spooky Spa scene in The Women in Cabin ten, which I won't spoiler for anybody.

So that was the last text I sent to my sister was this Spa hotel, saying we should go.

Okay, I have something bookmarked this week too.

In celebration of the launch of Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, we're teaming up with Little Free Library to do a book drop for our July Pick Spectacular Things.

Check out Little Free Libraries in your area and tag us on Instagram if you find one.

Plus, if you do find one of our books, we snuck in a fun little treat just for you.

Okay, now we're coming up on one of my favorite parts of the conversation.

It is time for speed read.

So here's how it works.

I'm putting sixty seconds on the clock and I'm going to ask you a series of rapid fire questions, so you have to say the first thing that comes to your mind, which I have a feeling you're going to be very good at So are you ready?

Are you locked in?

No?

I'm not ready, but I'll do my best.

Okay.

Three two one?

A famous murder case that could have been a Ruth Ware novel.

Oh my gosh, the mushrooms in the beef Wellington.

You hear a scream at the end of a darkened hallway, run away or inspect it.

I'll run towards it.

It might be somebody in trouble.

Favorite thriller novel to recommend to people.

Oh, this is hard, too too, too, too many.

I'm gonna have to say gone girl again.

We've already discussed it, but it's it's brilliant.

So you've killed a lot of characters, Ruth.

Do you ever regret killing off the wrong one?

No, by and large, if I had any regrets, it's probably not killing more of them.

Is there a book that you'd wish you'd written?

Louise Candlish's book Our House.

I read that and I thought, I want to write an ending that makes the reader feel the way I just felt, and I think I did it.

I won't say which book, though, I'll keep that secret.

Do you believe that everybody is capable of murder under the right circumstances.

Yes, I think anybody could kill if they really truly had to.

Yeah, Okay, My last one is what character are you most like?

This is a tough one.

I guess there's quite a lot of me in Low Blacklot, if I'm being honest, there's a bit of me and all of my characters, even the baddies.

I think they're like little voodoo dolls, little zombies that I stitch together, and the thing that brings them to life is a bit of me.

Ruth.

Thank you.

You have been absolutely charming and marvelous.

I have had the best time.

Thank you for your questions, which I feel have given me an intellectual workout.

And yeah, I'd so much fun.

And if you want a little bit more from us, come hang with us on socials.

We're at Reese's book Club on Instagram serving up books, vibes and behind the scenes magic.

And I'm at Danielle Robe Roba y come say hi and df me And if you want to go nineties on us, call us.

Okay, our phone line is open, so call now at one five zero one two nine one three three seven nine.

That's one five oh one two nine one three, three seven nine.

Share your literary.

Hot takes, book recommendations, questions about the monthly pick, or let us know what you think about the episode.

You just heard.

And who knows, you might.

Just hear yourself in our next episode, so don't be shy, give us a ring, and of course, make sure to follow Bookmarked by Reese's book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your shows until then, see you in the next chapter.

Bookmarked is a production of Hello Sunshine and iHeart Its executive produced by Reese Witherspoon and me Danielle Robe.

Production is by A Cast Creative Studios.

Our producers are Matty Foley, Brittany Martinez, Sarah Schleid, and Darby Masters.

Our production assistant is Avery Loftus.

Jenny Kaplan and Emily Rudder are the executive producers for A Cast Creative Studios.

Maureene Polo and Reese Witherspoon are the executive producers for Hello Sunshine.

Olga Kaminwha, Kristin Perla, Kelly Turner and Ashley Rappaport are associate producers for Reese's book Club.

Ali Perry and Lauren Hansen are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and Tim Palazola is our showrunner.