The Woman in Cabin 10 follows the tale of Laura “Lo” Blacklock, a middle aged journalist who has suffered a traumatizing event, trying to move forward by going on a work related holiday on a maiden cruise. Everything seems to be going functional for her until she hears someone being murdered in the cabin beside hers.

This was a hard read for me. I honestly thought I was going to quit reading not even fifty pages into the book. Lo was a difficult main character for me to enjoy. She was rude and unrelatable to me. It’s terrible but at the beginning of this book Lo is burglarized. However, she wasn’t harmed by intruder. He shoves her back into her room and breaks the knob off to keep her trapped in her room until he could make his getaway. She’s only stuck in her room for two hours and she heard him leave before she actually started working on the door to get out. This sets the scene for her to get wasted every day on the cruise until almost the end of the book and be straight up jerk to everyone. If it wasn’t my desire to figure out who was killed or why, I would have DNFed this book.

Trigger warning in advance for sexual assault. The scene to me was completely out on left field because of the previous conversations between Lo and her attacker, but I think Ware over did it with the traumatizing events: the mysterious breakdown, the burglary, the drunken assault, and kidnapping. I mean it was like one after the other except you don’t learn the reason for her breakdown till 95% into the book. The reason for her breakdown and “panic attacks” prior to the burglary was told as she just randomly started having them and never grew out of them.  The ending was ambiguous for a stand alone book.

What I did like is when Ware had to Lo teaming up with Ben to assist her in finding out more about the woman in Cabin 10. They made a good team. Also, I liked how descriptive Ware was about the ship and its staff.

Overall, I wasn’t impressed by the this book. I feel like it is a mixture of A.J. Finn’s Woman in the Window and a cruise. I was less than thrilled to have another drunk black out leading lady without no sense. Carrie defined Lo as stupid and I won’t correct her. If she’d just been more of a well rounded character then I’d have liked the book more. The book is divided seven parts which helps the story to flow towards the ending. I was gifted the hard back cover which is simply stunning. I give this book an overall rating of 3 stars out of five stars. I won’t say it’s a flop because despite Lo’s stupidity and rudeness the story was good. Ware did a great job of making twists and turns. I never saw the killer coming. So I do recommend the book just be prepared for a rather uninteresting female lead.