REVIEW: The Woman in Cabin 10

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
Completed 9/22/16
Fulfills 2016 Popsugar Challenge #27: A murder mystery
Counts toward the R.I.P. XI Challenge
Rating: 4 out of 5

I needed this book. It really helped me with the slump that I had fallen into this month.

I had saved this mystery to read on vacation, since I went on a cruise, and the book deals with mysterious actions aboard a small luxury cruise ship.

The narrator is an unreliable British female narrator who drinks too much. Sound familiar? I'm sure it does if you've read The Girl on the Train. Unlike Rachel, however, I actually did like Ware's narrator, Lo, and was able to sympathize more with her, perhaps because she has struggles with some of the same issues that I have had in the past on a more minor scale (mental health-wise, not alcohol-related). 

The main reason I was drawn to this book, aside from the cruise aspect, was that I had heard comparisons to Agatha Christie, who I read a lot of as a teenager after I had moved on from Nancy Drew. I think the comparison is fair for about the first two thirds of the book.

Then it takes a strange turn for the last third and goes more from mystery to thriller. Even though I finished the book quite quickly and am happy with the final resolution, I can't say that I really liked that one section of the book all that much. It just felt odd and is one of the reasons I can't give the book more than 4 stars. I wish there was another way she could have gotten to a similar conclusion.

The other reasons I can't give more than 4 stars are that (1) I feel that certain characters among the ship's passengers were not developed well enough, (2) I feel like if I really analyze it there are some plot holes (but I read this on vacation and wasn't particularly interested in analysis), and (3) I wish she would have included a some diagrams of the ship layout because it didn't really make that much sense to me.

All that being said, I still really liked this book. I thought the snippets of emails, texts, news clippings, etc. at the end of each section were really effective in building suspense. I can't wait to pick up this author's other major book, In a Dark, Dark Wood.