The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

From Goodreads:
In this tightly wound story, Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. At first, Lo’s stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are elegant. But as the week wears on, frigid winds whip the deck, gray skies fall, and Lo witnesses what she can only describe as a nightmare: a woman being thrown overboard. The problem? All passengers remain accounted for—and so, the ship sails on as if nothing has happened, despite Lo’s desperate attempts to convey that something (or someone) has gone terribly, terribly wrong…

Oh, boy ...

Nothing will ever be able to top the contempt and dislike I have for The Ship, but boy does this come close.

This review may be an unpopular opinion. The more I think about this book now that I'm finished, the more annoyed and angry I am at myself for reading it.  

I tried to like this book, I really did. The premise is interesting, and that was ultimately what drew me in. It looked like a modern re-telling of Agatha Christie's novels such as Murder on the Orient Express taking place on a boat rather than on a train. While this book tries to replicate certain specifics of Christie's novels, it lacks all the charm, excitement and other things that made Agatha Christie's novels tick. 

I felt like I couldn't get into this book. A great deal of that is thanks to INSUFFERABLE characters, specifically the narrator and main character Lo. She's not as bad as Lalla in The Ship, who will always be the worst character ever written, but if there was a list of the top ten worst characters in literature, I would put Lo Blacklock somewhere on there, probably within the top five. She is so dumb, rude, demeaning, and doesn't think before she speaks or acts. Her response to most things is to turn to drink and pills. She is so dumb and so mean-spirited, it made me want to shake her. It got to the point where I was rooting for the killer to win. So she could be Lalla's older sister the more I think about it. Another big con was how nothing really seemed to "happen". Like there were events and everything, but nothing really seemed to connect or be part of an overall story arc. The opening 30ish pages have nothing to do with the rest of the novel, but I guess it was pivotal to determine that Lo was on edge.  I still say that it should have been cut out entirely.  The side characters existed solely for expository purposes and not much else.

At its core, it's not overly exciting and drags often. There are so many plot holes both with the plot itself and with the characters, which also takes me out of the narrative I never felt scared or nervous, and I guessed the ending pretty early on. It was too convoluted for its own good and that's really disappointing because the blurb makes it sound so exciting and grim and claustrophobic, but it wasn't. I didn't feel any suspense whatsoever. It wasn't poorly written per se, but it wasn't anywhere close to being what I would describe as well-writen either. I saw the same descriptions and scenarios page after page, page after page, whether it be Lo self-medicating, reacting, speaking to other characters, or doing something silly that only further incriminates herself. The ending was so implausible, the more I think about it, the more it annoyed me.

In conclusion, don't read this book. The Woman in Cabin 10 featured insufferable characters, implausible, hole-ridden plots, events that didn't lead anywhere, and was all-around boring and repetitive. It could have been so well-done and suspenseful, but it wasn't. You know it's bad when you start rooting for the killer. In any case, while I didn't like this book very much, it still had an interesting premise and had a few good moments of writing. But, the more I thought about it after I finished, the more I dislike it and find problems with it. I'm going to give The Woman in Cabin 10 a 1/5 - like I said, nothing can top my dislike for The Ship, but this is a good contender for runner-up.