The Woman in Cabin 10

I was absolutely and completely certain that I had not imagined it. None of it. Not the mascara. Not the blood. Not the face of the woman in cabin 10. Most of all, I had not imagined her. And for her sake, I could not let this drop.

Of all the books described as the next The Girl on the Train, I'd say this is the closest fit (primarily because of the blackout drunk female narrator with recent emotional trauma who can't understand why no one believes her sole eyewitness account of something maybe having happened), and as much as I didn't really like The Girl on the Train, I liked The Woman in Cabin 10 even less. Spoiler-free review:

Here's what I did like: Set on a boutique luxury cruise ship, this is a true closed room mystery – it never gives an exact number of staff and passengers on board, but it wouldn't be more than two or three dozen all together – and with only one character believing that a crime has occurred, there's a credible sense of menace as Lo Blacklock attempts to investigate, knowing all the while that she might be alerting the perpetrator to her evidence. Adding to this, the book is divided into eight parts, and at the end of each, there is information added from the near future – a Facebook wall, an internet forum, an email chain – that informs the reader that Lo is in more danger than she knows. This device worked really well, and overall, the mechanics of a good mystery/thriller were employed. For the first half of the book, despite rolling my eyes at some really bad sentences, I was totally engaged with the big picture. But once the solution started unspooling, I was rolling my eyes at the whole thing.

This is what I mean by really bad sentences:

There were only two ways I was getting out of here – one was alive and the other was dead, and I knew which way I wanted it to be.

Thanks for clearing up where you fall out on the dead or alive issue. And:

There was a strange roaring in my ears, and I could hear sobbing sounds, like a frightened animal – it was a horrible noise halfway between terror and pain and an odd, detached part of myself knew that the person making the sounds was me.

How many times have I read that exact passage in books? Cliches don't give me chills. And I didn't like the way that author Ruth Ware attempted to telegraph information about characters through the books they read: The woman on antidepressants has brought along The Bell Jar and Winnie-the-Pooh. When things are at their most mysterious, a background character goes walking by with a Patricia Highsmith novel “hoisted beneath his arm”. And I reckon I'm supposed to find it all romantic (instead of icky) when a working-class girl says, “It was like something out of Fifty Shades, penniless me, and him, falling in love, showing me this life I'd never dreamed of...” (Wistful trailing off while imagining a Fifty Shades-style romance as found...)

But the worst, and unforgivable, fault of this book is its solution (I was able to hide my rantings about this behind spoiler tags on Goodreads but don't want to give anything away here.) So, to sum up: while I was engaged with the mystery as it was being set up (and especially liked the tension added by the extra info at the end of each “part”), I didn't like the writing at the sentence-by-sentence level, and found the solution to be silly and unbelievable. Do yourself a favour and give this one a pass.