The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

 

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware is another novel marketed as the next Gone Girl, or next Girl on the Train, that is sure to take the female lead thriller genre by storm. Of course it is not any of this and that’s too bad that it is marketed this way because there is a lot to enjoy and really like about this book. Ware, author of In a Dark, Dark Wood, has followed up her first novel with a book that is more mystery than thriller. More Noire than modern. Centered around the unraveling of its main characters sanity as it is the mystery it unfolds.

“…I rolled over and switched on the light and checked my phone: 3:04 a.m. Then I refreshed my e-mail. There was nothing from Judah, but I was too wide-awake now to go back to sleep. I sighed and picked up my book instead, lying splayed like a broken-backed bird on the bedside table, and opened it to the last page I’d read.
But although I tried to concentrate on the words, something niggled at the corner of my mind. It wasn’t just paranoia. Something had woken me up. Something that left me jumpy and strung out as a meth addict. Why did I keep thinking of a scream?
I was turning the page when I heard something else, something that barely registered above the sound of the engine and the slap of the waves, a sound so soft that the scrape of paper against paper almost drowned it out.
It was the noise of the veranda door in the next cabin sliding gently open.
I held my breath, straining to hear.
And then there was a splash…”

Lo Blacklock is a journalist who writes for a travel magazine but she finds her career stymied behind journalists who are more experienced and talented than she is. But suddenly she is given the opportunity of a lifetime. The assignment to spend a week aboard a luxury cruise with only a handful of exclusive clients. The cabins are luxurious and the guest list exclusive. But on the first night of the cruise Lo believes she is the sole witness to a crime. The woman in the cabin next to her is thrown overboard. But did she really see anything or did she just hear it and her mind supplied the rest? When she reports the crime she learns that the cabin next to her is empty. But that cannot be, because Lo had knocked on that cabin earlier and a young woman had answered. The Woman in Cabin 10. The woman who no one else on the cruise has ever seen. The woman who is now missing.

“…What had I done? Oh God, why had I done this, kept pushing, kept refusing to shut up. I had made myself a target, by my refusal to be silenced about what happened in that cabin. And yet…and yet what had happened…”

The Woman in Cabin 10 is reminiscent of the Agatha Christie novels of my youth. Those early mysteries that worked on character driven plot twists rather than action. In fact I thought a lot of Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window during the reading of this tale. The lone witness to the crime trying desperately to make the rest of the cast see what is happening around them. But the problem here is not the story, the story is pretty damn good. It is with the main character herself. Lo Blacklock. She does everything possible to destroy her own credibility. Getting drunk on the first night of the cruise, emotional outbursts and hysterical rants drive both passengers and crew away from her. She goes from anger to strength to tears and then to drinking and popping pills all in the matter of a few pages. She is self centered and short sighted. An example of which is early on in the book where after a traumatic episode in her own apartment she walks to her boyfriend’s home, believing him to be away and takes her clothes off and falls on her bed. He actually comes home and crawls into bed with her which she responds by smashing his face with a lamp. One hospital visit later find them back in his bed, making love and then when he tells her he loves her she gets angry breaks up with him and leaves. Then of course is upset when she is on the cruise and doesn’t hear from him. When confronted with taking pills for her depression she responds with anger and tears, because that shows people you are emotionally stable. And of course by binge drinking as well.

This was a weakness with Ware’s first novel as well, In a Dark, Dark Wood. The main character is really not able to drive the story. But that aside this is really a good book and as the second novel by Ruth Ware, it is much better than the first book and so I am looking forward to the next book with strong expectation. But can we lighten the baggage on the main character some?