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

One of Us is Lying

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One of Us is Lying is a young adult novel by Karen M. McManus. It was published in 2017 by Random House. Everyone I know who has read it describes the premise as “The Breakfast Club” meets “Pretty Little Liars” which is a pretty on the nose depiction. The book can be purchased here from Bookshop.org.

The non-spoiler-y summary is as follows: On a Monday afternoon, five students, a brain, a beauty, a criminal, an athlete and an outcast, walk into detention. An hour later, only four walk out. Simon, the outcast and the creator of a gossip app about the school, dies during detention. It’s soon revealed that his death was no accident. The four students in detention with him are the prime suspects and everyone has a motive. More people wanted Simon gone than didn’t.

What unfolds is a complex murder-mystery taking place in a modern high school. One of the strongest points of the book, and the most appealing, is this backdrop of a suburban high school. Unlike traditional mystery novels, a la Sherlock Holmes, the investigation takes place in our time. Simon’s death gains national attention and the investigation unfolds surrounded by, and impacted by, the 24-hour news cycle and the current trend to sensationalize everything. It’s on national news, a 48 Hours-like television program does a piece on the murder while its being investigated. The plot isn’t just impacted by news sources; there’s the added perspective of social media and the role it plays in hew news spreads and how stories are covered. It becomes clear, with some minor characters, that the death doesn’t matter much to them, but the attention the story gains is what they care about.

The novel unfolds through alternating point-of-view segments of the four suspects: Bronwyn (the brain), Addy (the beauty), Nate (the criminal) and Cooper (the athlete). While I’m not always a fan of narratives with alternating POVs, it works extremely well here because it gives the reader a chance to see the murder, and its aftermath, from more than one perspective. Not only does this provide possible motives for every character, but it also allows the reader to understand why a particular character wouldn’t have killed Simon. No one character is presented as being squeaky clean or obviously guilty. While the characters are all archetypes common in media aimed at teenagers, they aren’t one-dimensional, which is refreshing for the reader and adds depth to the story.

One of my favorite aspects of this book is how the characters’ lives are changed by this common event. Others become immediately suspicious of them, but that’s not the only outcome of Simon’s death. The murder, the investigation, the press coverage, the four students trying to solve what happened leads to each individual coming to some kind of realization, whether its about self-acceptance or getting a toxic person out of their life. The murder investigation is obviously a huge plotpoint, and their lives may never be the same, but smaller problems arise, less important details come to life. Despite the fact that they’re all suspects, and that each character only knows their truth about what happened, they are brought closer together by this event and try to work together to determine what exactly happened.

Now, let’s discuss the plot without spoiling the ending. I enjoyed the death itself, mostly because it posed an interesting mystery. Simon doesn’t get shot or stabbed. There isn’t a power outage and when the lights turn back on, he’s dead on the floor. He dies, everyone in the room sees it, but no one’s able to figure out what happened. How he died, and how the killer is able to kill him, is just as compelling as trying to figure out who did it. The revelation of how Simon died, and who killed him, is equally compelling, and unlike some novels, the answer doesn’t come out of nowhere, nor does there need to be an extensive amount of exposition given, for it to make sense. It also isn’t glaringly obvious up front who’s involved with what happened.

While I find McManus’s novel great overall, I do have some minor complaints. A few of the secrets the main four characters want to keep hidden are a bit cliché or overdramatized. Some of that could be chalked up to teenagers having heightened emotions, and everything feeling like a huge deal in high school. Simon, our murder victim, has plenty of enemies and people who aren’t sad to see him die which feels a little bit of a cop-out, but that could just be me. There were a few scenes in the book where a character’s actions seemed a bit over the top or their words didn’t sound like something a normal person would say. Again, this is just my opinion but those scenes kind of took me out of the story a little bit. I found the treatment of one character after her secret gets out, because of course the secrets are revealed, was a little heavy-handed but I’m also picky about the specific topic it covered. My dislikes are mostly related to small details, and not major aspects to the story.

Rating: 4 stars

In A Dark, Dark Wood

“In a dark, dark wood, there was a dark, dark house. And in the dark, dark house, there was a dark, dark room.” This theme is common among most horror and thriller stories going back generations. We are told from an early age that the woods and dark places are scary and that we should avoid them. A remote house in the middle of dense woods is the setting for In A Dark, Dark Wood. In A Dark, Dark Wood is a 2015 thriller/mystery novel written by Ruth Ware. It quickly became a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the best books of the year by NPR.

Source: Simon & Schuster

The premise of the book is this: a reclusive writer names Leonora, Nora to her friends, is invited to a hen do, or as its known in the US a bachelorette party, by her friend Clare. Given that she hasn’t seen Clare in ten years, she’s shocked and a little confused that she’s been invited. She somewhat reluctantly agrees to attend. The event is being held at a remote house in the woods owned by a relative of one of the bridesmaids.  As the weekend progresses, it soon becomes clear that not everything is as it seems and the group may not be alone in the woods. Someone may not make it out of the woods alive.

The story is very much told in two parts. There are the events of the bachelorette party and the events that take place after. Someone dies and the “after” storyline depicts the police trying to determine what exactly happened, along with the narrator. The transition back and forth can be a little jarring, but it prevents the reader from learning too much information at any one time.

The writing is pretty good with Ware doing a noteworthy job building suspense as time goes on. The book isn’t badly written, the plot makes sense, and the reveal doesn’t come out of nowhere. If anything, the opposite is true. My criticism comes from two fronts. Predictability and a reliance on convenience.

First, predictability. I was able to accurately guess who the killer was early on. Most of the characters are archetypes that serve a single purpose. It’s clear, once the characters are gathered together, who the killer is and who the "fake-out" murderer is. The character that’s set-up to seem like the killer is painted early on as a nervous wreck, so it becomes clear that person isn’t the killer, due to how obvious it seems. The only thing that I didn’t predict was a detail about Nora’s backstory that is only terribly important as it relates to the killer’s motive. Nora’s backstory is focused on a little too much and, in the end, it exists to make the motive seem more legitimate. There’s nothing wrong with a story being predictable, I was just hoping for more.

The plot relies a lot on convenience. Lenora is in a car accident after the murder, which means she doesn’t remember what happened. The unreliable narrator angle is why the dual storylines work, but the decision to have an unreliable narrator, and the reason why she’s unreliable, is still incredibly convenient. The way the victim ends up at the house is based entirely on convenience. The murder was planned, but how it happened cycles back to one or two very specific events that could've gone differently, preventing the murder altogether. Patterns of behavior are ignored until they suddenly become relevant when the plot needs them to. I understand the need for convenience and red herrings, but there comes a point where the story is too reliant on coincidence.

I read this book on the beach and I liked it, but I wasn’t thrilled by it. It didn’t blow my mind like many others have. I suppose my biggest gripe with it is that there was potential for a compelling story, but it never manifested. The setting in the middle of the woods never gets taken full advantage of. I picked up the book expecting a supernatural thriller or even just a creepy thriller. I didn’t get that. Instead, it was a fairly by-the-numbers murder mystery without that much actual mystery.

Overall rating: 2.5 stars