The Woman in Cabin 10 - Review

3/5 stars

If I have to be completely honest, I started reading this book with high expectations: after "In a Dark, Dark Wood" I was looking for another enthralling mystery from Ruth Ware. Well, I cannot say I've been disappointed, I liked and enjoyed the book, but I cannot say I'm entirely satisfied with it either.

But let me start from the beginning.

At the beginning of the story, we meet our protagonist Lo, who experience a burglary and the fear of being trapped in your own apartment with no way out. Ok, it is a nice way of setting the frame of mind of this woman who's about to start a cruise, I get that, but maybe the all thing was carried for too many pages. Here and there other tips about her life are scattered: she is a travel journalist (buts she never travels, she writes everything from her desk in London), and she has to go on a cruise because her boos is pregnant and cannot go. Well, Lo isn't really satisfied with her position, she hopes this will be her chance to advance her career, so this can be a nice way to overcome the awful experience of the burglary too.

Then we meet her "boyfriend". I don't really know how to call him, because we don't fully understand what kind of relationship they are in until later, when we learn he asked her to move in with him and she said "I'll think about it". When she repeats this frase they part ways badly, but she has to go on that cruise so...we'll see.

The cruise: ok, onboard we have the usual set of travelling phony rich characters we can find in a lot of books and movies everywhere, but they are consistent and helps us understand Lo better, so I cannot complain. And then we discover one of them, Ben, is Lo's ex and they have a complicated history, connected to her anxiety problems. Wait, what??? Lo had just an experience with a burglar, she's not satisfied with her work AND she suffers from anxiety and has to take medications, all the while drinking as an alcoholic? Fantastic. Oh, did I forget anything? Yes, the cabin next to hers was supposed to be empty, but she finds a girl there, a mysterious girl that she doesn't see when she's introduced to the other guests....uhm...strange.

And then at night, while she lies nearly wasted on her bed hoping to finally sleep (she hasn't sleep for what, three days now?), she hears a noise, a scream and something fall into the sea, with a splash that could only have come from a corpse. And might that be? But the mystery girl of course! So she goes on a rampage Nancy Drew-stile trying to find out who she was and what happened to her, but nobody believes her. At about half the book we discover she disappeared too, from some paper clips and blog notes in which her boyfriend Judah and her family report her missing to the authorities.

Eventually she is actually taken captive and the mystery is unraveled, but she has to escape from her prison. That was a nice twist, but not really mind-blowing, since we already knew she would eventually disappear. So all we have to understand is how she will pull this off, but that doesn't come as a real surprise: the mystery girl wasn't all that bad after all. They are pretty much the same, both prisoners, only in different cages.

At the end we see her back with Judah, they will finally move in together (in the US though) and she has decided to quit her job and go looking for another, the one she wanted all along: she will be a reporter. Ok, so this all experience was exactly what you needed to finally decide to do something good for yourself? Good, but not exactly a heart stopping finale. Well, if you don't count the last dialogue, where we understand mystery girl is alive and kicking.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, I enjoyed it. For Christ's sake, I read it in three days! But it wasn't completely satisfying, the end seemed sort of too slow and too quick at the same time: the moment before she's stuck, then running for her life because Richard the Almighty Bad guy has everyone in his pocket (even the police), then she finds herself in a barn, and then she's home in a couple of pages? I don't know, I feel there's something missing in the whole picture, even if all the narrative threads are closed in the end.

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