Book Review : The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

The Woman in Cabin 10

by Ruth Ware

Published Year : 2016

Page Count : 406 pages

Medium Used: remarkable 2

Genre : Psychological Fiction,Suspense, Thriller, Drama, 2024-read.

Rating : 3.5/5

The prose is good. The story is predictable, yet surprising at times. It is like reading a comfort book, crawling under a favorite lamp, with the book in one hand and a hot mug of coffee in another. It was a fast paced, easy read book. It gave me quite a scare because the likelihood, of a harrowing situation the main character goes through in the book, is easily high.

LO Blacklock is a travel journalist who goes on a small boat Aurora’s maiden cruise along with a bunch of other journalists and rich people. On the first night aboard, she meets a young woman in the cabin next to hers. The next night, she hears a splash in the water and sees a smear of blood on the window pane of the neighbor’s cabin. No one acknowledges to knowing the woman. Its like she was never there. But Lo still has the mascara bottle the woman gave her on the first night. Most of the evidence is removed by the time she reports this to the boat security. As she digs deeper, she is followed by an anonymous person, that feels threatened enough, to warn her off. She is framed as an unreliable witness because of her taking antidepressants while heavily drinking. She soon meets the woman in question herself and receives great shock. Who is the woman that got killed? Did anything happen at all or is it all her own imagination playing tricks on her?

I felt there were a few loose ends that were unexplained or left to the imagination. I also thought the narrator makes things unnecessarily complicated through all the pretending to “be like Anne” stuff. Why did Carrie exchange positions with her in the prison like enclosure? Is she out of her mind? Why didn’t she escape and make away like the main character?