Ponder Post: The Woman in Cabin 10

The Woman in Cabin 10 is written by Ruth Ware who also wrote The Lying Game. I enjoyed The Lying Game immensely and rated it 5 stars. (See my post for 5/3/18.) My expectations for the Woman in Cabin 10 were similarly high and I was dreadfully disappointed. The main character has a panic disorder which subjects her to anxiety attacks. She winds up in situations that would freak out a psychologically normal person so she consumes alcohol as well as medications to cope. In describing Laura’s physical state, I feel the author must have used up all the plausible phrases for a headache – throbbing head, pulsing skull, pounding temples, etc. –  and worn out the pages of her thesaurus to find even more alternatives. I would have liked a reprieve on some pages where the heroine’s headache was abated, at least for a few paragraphs.

The heroine Laura Blackwell is a travel journalist and is trying to climb the corporate ladder in her career; at least she thinks she wants to advance. She is in an intimate relationship with her boyfriend Judah; at least she thinks she want to be. She is assigned to be on the maiden voyage of a yacht-sized luxury liner and views it as a big opportunity for herself; at least she thinks this could be a breakthrough for her. This heroine is so full of self doubt and ill-defined goals that I developed a strong dislike for her. A book is very, very long when you find yourself not rooting for the heroine. The cover is appealing; it is realistic enough that I needed to repeatedly touch it to assure myself it was not wet with condensation or water rivulets. But the well-designed cover was insufficient to sway my low opinion of the 384 droning pages within. The droning was indeed the book – not the confines of the airplane I was on while reading. As a captured audience, I was obliged to plod onward with The Woman in Cabin 10 for lack of a better option.

The plot is that Laura thinks she witnessed a murder of the woman in cabin 10, but because of her inherent psychological frailties, she is not believed. Description of the other passengers and staff, all potential suspects in the unconfirmed murder, drags on ad nauseam. The mystery kept me plugging along, but if the heroine croaked in the process, I would have been perfectly OK with that, possibly even relieved that she would finally be out of her misery. In case it is not obvious, I rate this book low, probably 2 stars. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express it was not.