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Book Review of The Woman in Cabin 10

The Woman in Cabin 10
maura853 avatar reviewed on + 542 more book reviews


Very readable and well paced thriller. For once, the cover blurb describing it as "Agatha Christie meets 'Girl on Train'" is a pretty fair summary -- Ware manages to capture the claustrophobia of one of Christie's closed setting novels (Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None, for examples) with the rather more modern concerns of a young woman whose career has led her down a path of undermining friendships, and occasional blackout drinking. When she thinks she has heard something in the cabin next door to hers, can we trust her? Can she trust herself to get to the bottom of it?

Inevitably runs out of steam a little as it approaches the end, when we learn the full details of the Evil Cunning Plan that the narrator has blundered into. But Ware has great control of the pacing of the revelations: just when the reader might be getting a bit restive, and screaming "get on with it, woman" to our slightly hungover amateur sleuth, Ware reveals something that is a game-changer -- and keeps you reading. Nice twist at the end, too.