One By One by Freida McFadden

 

One by One is a suspense thriller by Freida McFadden. It's one of her shorter books, but it kept me enthralled the whole time. The story is about 6 friends who decide to take a little getaway together at a resort to unwind and reconnect. Unfortunately, the van they travel in breaks down before getting there, and there's no cell reception in the area. The group gets lost and weird things start happening. It's written by McFadden so you can imagine there will be deaths involved. We find out at the end what happened. The main character, Claire, is cheating on her husband Noah, with his best friend Jack. Noah found out and to get back at her, he kissed Claire's best friend, Lindsay. Lindsay, who had an abusive childhood, grew up hating anyone who would cheat, and repeatedly killed people that she caught cheating. Lindsay found out accidentally (by seeing a text message) that Claire is cheating on Noah with Jack. So now Lindsay wants to kill Claire, Noah, and Jack for cheating, so she devised the plan of luring everyone to this remote resort. She couldn't do all the killings on her own, so she found someone online with a criminal record to help - Warner. Her and Warner tampered the van and used a fake map to make sure everyone gets lost, then a giant magnet to make sure the compass would give incorrect readings, and a signal jammer to make sure no one had cellphone signal. They made sure the map would take the group to a cabin instead of the resort, a cabin where they already killed the owner. The cabin gives them more time to carry out the killings because it provided them with running water and some food. At the cabin, Lindsay killed Warner because she thinks his criminal record could make him a liability. She tried to kill Claire next, but Noah was able to stab her in time to stop her. Lindsay survived the stab wound as help was on the way - Lindsay had called the cops before trying to kill everyone so she could establish her alibi and pin the murder on Warner (she planned on telling the cops that her life was spared because she was playing dead and Warner killed himself after believing he killed everyone). Lindsay has to go to jail for life for her life of crime.

Plot holes: 1. The book claims the battery died in the van. As far as I know, it's very unlikely for a car battery to die in the middle of driving, even if it's been tampered with. Also, even with tampering, how could the killer make sure the van dies where it did (in the middle of the woods)?

2. The book claims they were lost the moment they lost all cellphone signal. That's not how GPS directions work. Once it's programmed in it'll continue to work even without signal.

3. At one point, the book told us Claire saw Noah's phone seemed to have had a bar of signal before it disappeared. We know Claire wasn't constantly checking everyone's phones. We also know that at any moment if you get a bar on your phone, all the text messages would fly in so you would know right away. How did that not happen to any of the innocent travelers?