The Woman In Cabin 10

Source: Amazon

The Woman In Cabin 10 is a 2016 thriller written by Ruth Ware. It was published by Scout Press, a division Simon & Schuster. The novel was a New York Times Bestseller and was named one of the best mystery books of 2016 by The Washington Post.

The premise of the novel is as follows. Lo Blacklock, a journalist for a travel magazine, is given a long-awaited, potentially life-changing assignment. A week on a small luxury cruise vessel through Norway. At first, the trip seems like a dream come true, but as the week continues, Lo witnesses something terrifying: a woman being thrown overboard. The only problem is that all the passengers remain accounted for, and the ship continues on its journey as if nothing happened. Lo then tries desperately to convince someone, anyone, that something is amiss.

The story starts off slow at first. The book opens with Lo being the victim of a burglary, and around thirty pages are dedicated to her having that experience, getting her locks changed, replacing a few of the stolen items and feeling traumatized about a man breaking into her house. Since the robbery winds up being significant later, I understand having that be the opening of the story. However, I personally felt like the sections about her buying a new phone and getting her locks fixed weren’t needed. Those details had no real significance to the plot and felt like unneeded filler.

Eventually, though, Lo goes off on her cruise where the main plot begins. A successful businessman married to a wealthy philanthropist has decided to start his own, exclusive luxury cruiseline to see the Northern Lights. She, along with other journalists and a few investors, are invited on the maiden voyage in a bid to earn good publicity and raise interest in the experience. She has a brief, random encounter with the woman in the cabin next to hers, number 10. She doesn’t see the woman at dinner later, and when she hears a body being thrown overboard, assumes the worst. Soon after, she’s informed that the cabin next to her was empty and no one, guest or staff, is unaccounted for. The bulk of the novel consists of Lo trying to figure out what happened and prove that the cabin was occupied and the woman did go missing to anyone who’d listen.

The mystery did intrigue me at the beginning. Was the woman a stowaway? Did Lo see what she thought she saw? Was this part of some conspiracy? How could a body have been thrown overboard and no one be missing? Those questions all occurred to me as I read. I became even more curious as, bit by bit, all the evidence she has either goes missing or is destroyed. It begins to look like this whole thing is a big cover-up.

My curiosity was diminished once lo really starts investigating. Her “investigation” consists of talking to the staff, asking them the same basic questions and receiving the same answers. For some reason, she doesn’t think to talk to more than one or two other guests, and when she does talk to them, she tries to be sneaky about it and ends up not asking anything relevant or likely to get results. The whole investigation part is pretty boring and repetitive. I still wanted to know what happened, but the story dragged on during this part.

All of my suspense went away once she finds herself captive and at the mercy of someone responsible for the mystery. I stopped being anxious, and started getting confused. There was a death, but it wasn’t who she thought. There isn’t one person acting alone on the ship. The death being covered up really doesn’t need to be. The “bad guy’s” plan doesn’t really make sense once its all explained. Once she works out what happened, the rest of the novel consists of Lo trying to figure out a way to get away from her captor and somehow reveal what really happened. Of course, those attempts are somewhat thwarted by finding herself in an unfamiliar place and not knowing who can and can’t be trusted.

I can’t really go any further in this review without discussing Lo herself. Lo, or Laura, isn’t a likeable character. Even before she stumbles upon this mystery, she’s rude to people she’s never met before, even ruder to her own boyfriend and a little conceited. On top of that, she’s somewhat of an unreliable narrator. She suffers from anxiety, due to the burglary, and takes medication for another condition, Unfortunately, her mental state makes her unreliable, and its even remarked on in the story that her medication, combined with alcohol, could have side-effects, leading a character to dismiss her. Her behavior is wildly erratic as well, since she goes from being livid at her ex-boyfriend, who’s on the trip because the story needed more drama I guess, to apologizing to him for reacting sensibly to something he does to her.

To be honest, I found this book to be fairly average. It has exciting moments, interspersed with stretches where it drags on. As stated earlier, I found the emphasis on the burglary to be a bit excessive and unneeded. It also irked me that the argument made, by a crew member, that everything was fine and Lo hadn’t seen a murder, was that she was projecting about the burglary. Later, he brought up that she was on medication and she maybe saw or heard something that wasn’t there as a result of that. The trope of “Character has mental illness, is therefore crazy and not to be believed by other characters” is insulting and I hate having to read it.

Overall, it’s an okay book. The mystery had potential for an interesting reveal or twist, but instead it followed the same plot as other stories with a few details changed. I wanted to like it, but there were too many moments when I got annoyed at the story itself, rolled my eyes and pushed through to finish the book. There was a lot of potential here, and Ware has been clearly inspired by Agatha Christie’s novels, but the potential hasn’t been realized. It’s a good book if you need something to read on a flight or a train.

Rating: 2.3 stars