“The Woman in Cabin 10” by Ruth Ware

I had heard of the author Ruth Ware and her debut novel, “The Dark, Dark Wood” but hadn’t got down to reading it. I was therefore delighted to get this opportunity to read and review another thriller by her called, ” The Woman in Cabin 10.”

Laura “Lo” Blacklock is a journalist with Velocity a travel magazine. She is thrilled when she is assigned a task she seldom gets, to cover a luxury cruise on Lord Bullmer’s private cruise ship, “Aurora.” Ordinarily, her boss Rowan Lonsdale would have made the trip. However, her pregnancy came in the way of this cruise and the opportunity fell, as it were,  into Laura’s lap.  It couldn’t have been better timed because she was under tremendous stress following an argument with her long-standing boyfriend, Judah Lewis. She had also undergone a traumatic experience when a burglar had crashed into her apartment when she was having a shower. The cruise along the Scandinavian coast promised to be a most welcome change for Laura.

Everyone knew that Bullmer had the blue blood and the title but the money came from his wife Anne, the Lynstad heiress. The others on the cruise were largely his personal friends, moneyed and sophisticated, making Laurar feel a bit diffident on how she could hold her own in their midst. Fortunately for her, another passenger happens to be Ben Howard who had earlier worked with her in Velocity. Welcomed warmly aboard, Lo is assigned Cabin 9, the Linnaeus Suite, which is as charming and luxurious as the rest of the ship. The trip promised to be incredibly exciting.

The trip turns out to a terrible experience for Laura when one night she sees the body of the woman being thrown overboard from the balcony of the adjoining Cabin 10. What makes it worse is her seeing so much blood on the deck which suggests the woman must have been killed and thrown into the sea. The nightmare becomes progressively worse when no one believes her story least of all Nilsson the Security Chief of the Aurora. He and the others take pains to impress upon her that neither the passenger list or the staff roster has a woman matching the description of the one in Cabin 10 Laura gave to anyone who would listen to her.

Ware deftly carries you through the twists and turns in the fast paced story. The plot is interesting and the characters believable but one I feel that Lo Blacklock was too bitter towards everyone in the world, even when there was no need for her to be so. The story reaches an unexpected climax and leaves you totally satisfied with the read.