One Perfect Couple (spoilers and ending explained) | Ruth Ware
Are you looking for a spoiler-free review of One Perfect Couple? Head back to the main review to avoid spoilers. You can always return here when you’re ready to unpack the ending!
What is One Perfect Couple about? (brief recap)
Five couples head to a remote island in the Indian Ocean to compete in a reality television show called The Perfect Couple. Each week one person is eliminated and the remaining contestants can recouple. Not long after arriving on the island, the first contestant is eliminated and the crew return to the boat for the night. That evening a storm rolls through, damaging most of the island and killing one contestant and one crew member left behind on the island. The remaining eight contestants are stranded on the island with little food, water, or supplies, and no way to signal for help. As they fight to survive and hope rescue is on it’s way, they start dying one at a time. Someone on the island doesn’t plan on them all surviving…
Who are the main characters?
Baz is the executive producer of the show and Camille is the another producer. Lyla is the narrator and is a PhD in virology. Her partner is Nico, a struggling actor who hopes to use the show to rebuild his career. There are four other couples: Bayer and Angel, Dan and Santana, Joel and Romi, and Conor and Zana.
Angel is a glamorous French woman who aspired to be a Formula One racer as a child. Her partner Bayer is dark-haired and extremely physically fit, describing his bench pressing routine at first meeting. Romi is a bubbly blond, YouTube star. Her partner Joel is a serious, glasses-wearing university lecturer. Santana is a beautiful strawberry blonde who is diabetic. Her partner Dan is a surfer-dude type who Lyla soon finds out is gay and pretending to be with Santana to help her get on the show. Conor is a strikingly handsome, tall, athletic man who has a controversial YouTube channel. His partner Zana is the youngest person on the cast and very quiet.
What happened in Part I and Part II of One Perfect Couple? (spoilers)
After arriving on the island, the contestants compete in the first challenge about how well they know their partner. Lyla wins with the most correct answers about Nico, but Nico loses and is the first contestant eliminated. On his way out, Nico screams at Lyla for ruining the opportunity for him. Nico returns to the boat along with the crew who will be offsite until the morning. Lyla and Joel are sent to the water villa–a special villa that is across a jetty from the main island.
That night a massive storm rolls in, and Lyla and Joel are stranded in the water villa when the jetty is ruined by the storm. In the morning, they swim to reach the other side and find that Joel and Romi’s villa was smashed in and Romi is dead. They also find the body of a dead production member–the only one left on the island. They bury both bodies. There are now eight people left. The crew doesn’t return and the group looks for supplies, finding a meager amount of fresh water and food. Lyla discovers a radio but can’t reach anyone.
Bayer and Conor reach a boiling point over supplies, which Conor wants to ration while Bayer disagrees. Conor has managed to hammer some boards in place so the jetty is dangerous but functional. That night, Conor moves the rest of the supplies across the jetty to the water villa so he is in sole control of the rations. Bayer and him get in a fight and Bayer attacks Conor. Conor fights back, beating Bayer to death. Everyone is distraught and afraid of Conor. There are now seven left.
Dan is uncomfortable that Conor has taken control of all the supplies. When Dan’s diabetic partner Santana realizes that someone has taken all of her insulin, Dan storms off to confront Conor. Later, no one can find Dan and Conor insists he hasn’t seen him. Dan’s body washes up on shore. While burying Dan, Lyla finds a vial of Santana’s insulin in his hand. She realizes that Dan was murdered. When she shows what she found to Joel, he reacts strangely and Lyla begins to wonder if Joel is helping Conor. There are now six people left.
Joel isn’t seen after he walks off, and the women suspect he is dead. Meanwhile Conor refuses to give the women any of their portion of the water until they find eight unripe coconuts. Lyla notices that Conor is much more hydrated and fed than anyone else, and suspects he has been consuming more than his ration of supplies. While Zana is up a tree trying to get coconuts, she sees a ship on the horizon. The women rush to light a fire and signal the ship with the smoke, but Conor doesn’t help. The ship passes by without stopping.
What happened in Part III of One Perfect Couple? (spoilers)
When the women see that Zana has a black eye, their suspicions that Conor has been assaulting her are confirmed. The women realize that Conor will kill them all to save the rations for himself and avoid them sharing that he murdered Bayer. Santana offers her last vial of insulin to murder Conor. Santana manages to get the syringe in Conor’s thigh before he wakes up and attacks her, nearly beating Santana to death. Zana lunges at Conor and drowns him in the ocean. Lyla jumps in to help Zana, and awakens the next morning on the beach. Joel has been discovered murdered, hanging from a tree, and Conor is also dead. There are now four people left.
When Angel uses her knowledge of car batteries to get a small amount of life back in the radio battery, she’s able to reach a small ship who promises to send help. Zana worries that she will be convicted for murdering Conor, and the women plot to cover it up. They ask Zana to write fake journal entries re-writing the deaths to be accidents instead of murders, and painting Conor as the hero. This way the authorities won’t have a reason to suspect that anyone wanted Conor dead.
What happens after they are rescued?
A ship arrives to rescue the remaining four and brings them to Jakarta. They learn that the crew boat was lost at sea. They also put together that Baz had a vendetta against Conor because Conor was the reason Baz’s niece took her own life. He set up the show to get Conor to expose himself to the world for who he really is by strategically putting cast members on who would reveal it. Unfortunately the world will now never know that Conor was a villain due to the fake diary Zana wrote.
When Lyla returns home, she is able to reactivate her phone and receives a flood of messages. The ones that arrived hours after she turned in her phone to production are from Nico after he was eliminated from the show. In them, Nico apologizes for his actions and tells Lyla he loves her and he knows he should let her go. The book ends with Santana texting Lyla to see if she’ll be ok. Lyla realizes for the first time that she will be.
What did I think about the ending of One Perfect Couple?
Don’t read this expecting any twists! It was clear from Dan’s death onwards that Conor is the murderer, and Ware doesn’t make an attempt to hide that from the reader or the characters. The tension comes primarily from Conor’s threatening presence (and the depleting supplies). Conor is not a particularly intelligent villain, but he is a terrifying one in his lack of regard for anyone other than himself and his physicality. He is not only much larger and stronger than the other men besides Bayer, but he also murders the men first, leaving the women. Conor ends up being revealed to be a sexist, racist YouTuber so there is nothing you’ll find redeeming in his character and you won’t be sad when he dies. I was surprised it took them so long to realize that Conor was clearly giving himself more rations. Why else would he have taken them? There also wasn’t a lot of suspense over who would be found dead. Any time a character went off on their own, you could expect them to be murdered.
Though this was marketed as being inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, it didn’t have the same vibe as the source material. Both involve people trapped on an island, dying one at a time. However, And Then There Were None had intricate plotting and motivation behind the murders, as well as a compelling mystery about who was responsible and how it was accomplished. In this case, Baz arranged for everyone to be there but he had no intention of anyone dying. Conor is responsible for several of the deaths (Dan, Joel, and Bayer), but these were crimes of opportunity. I think that comparison (which to be fair, was probably the marketing team and not Ware herself) was misleading to the reader.
The most compelling part to this book was the vivid setting and the intimate descriptions of the physical and psychological fatigue that comes in a survivalist situation like this. I felt the tension of the water and food dwindling. While they could find some edible fruit and fish, there is no other source of fresh water and no desalination system. This made it feel like there was a clock counting down to zero. The deaths didn’t pack the punch you’d expect, other than Bayer’s because it occurred in such a horrific way and Lyla saw it happen. Since the others happened behind the scenes, they felt vague to the reader, especially since it wasn’t immediately clear that Dan was murdered, and Joel wasn’t discovered dead until after Conor was also dead and the group was about to be rescued. We actually only heard about his death briefly in an aside, Lyla never sees his body and we also don’t hear from Angel directly about the discovery. Many of the deaths felt void of emotion, which was odd in a story like this.
Initially I didn’t love the reality tv premise because it seemed so out of character for Ruth Ware, but it moved on to the survival part quickly (we didn’t even see a full day of filming). I was disappointed that there was so little at the ending that tied back to it. Since the entire crew died, Baz’s role in it is revealed by the surviving women piecing it together. It didn’t have the same impact it might have if someone from the crew survived. In addition, there was a lot of talk on the island about the cameras still recording in the villas because they were battery powered, and the woman worried about whether the footage would match their version of events. This was glossed over at the end. Zana’s fake diary entries offered some intrigue because the reader reads them throughout the book before we knew that they intentionally planned them after Conor died. Initially I wondered if Zana might be helping him and that was why she wrote such favorable journals about Conor.
The ending chapter was surprisingly emotional and had no twists at all. After the women piece together what they believe happened with Baz and Conor, the story jumps forward to when Lyla is already home. She plugs in the SIM card to her new phone and gets dozens of text messaged, including several from Nico before he died. I was ready for the texts to have some big reveal, but they didn’t at all. It was Nico apologizing for blowing up at Lyla. Since Lyla already questioned from the beginning of the book whether she and Nico should even be dating, this didn’t land for me. I am glad Nico went to his watery grave apologizing, in theory. But I wanted some other twist to make me think after the book ended. In general, the ending felt rushed.
Overall an entertaining book that had me highly engaged in how the survivors would get off the island. It isn’t a twist-y psychological thriller. Don’t expect much in terms of reveals or plotting–this is a straight forward survival thriller and it doesn’t purport to be anything else.
