The Woman in Cabin 10

Lo Blacklock, a travel journalist recovering badly from a burglary at her flat, is sent to cover the maiden voyage of a small luxury cruise ship in the North Sea.

On the first night she hears something and sees what appears to be a body thrown from the balcony next door. The cabin is empty, has never been occupied, and the passenger manifest accounts for everyone.

A body goes over the side from a cabin that the ship insists nobody has ever stayed in.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

A ship with ten cabins is an unusually tight closed circle: a known number of people, no way off, and the same faces at every meal.

Ware uses the constraint well, and the impossibility of avoiding anyone is as important as the impossibility of leaving.

Lo has been drinking heavily, is taking antidepressants, and is demonstrably traumatised by the burglary, all of which the crew learn quickly.

The construction is careful: her unreliability is real and is also being used against her, and the novel keeps both true simultaneously. Ware also gives her a genuine and specific reason for the drinking, which prevents the impairment from reading as a convenient plot device.

The book's central experience is a woman reporting something and being managed rather than heard, by people who are unfailingly polite about it.

The courtesy is the point. Nobody is hostile and everybody is condescending, which is considerably more effective than open dismissal. Ware also has the crew respond with practical kindness — tea, rest, a doctor — which is exactly how such a dismissal would actually be conducted.

The passengers are extremely rich and the ship is designed to make them comfortable, and the novel is observant about the specific way money makes awkwardness disappear.

Lo's position as a working journalist among people who are being hosted is used consistently. The other journalists aboard are also drawn precisely, and the small hierarchy among people who are all being hosted is well observed.

The first half builds slowly through social observation and accumulating doubt; the second half becomes a conventional confinement thriller.

The shift is more abrupt than in Ware's debut, and the final third is considerably less interesting than what precedes it. The confinement thriller that the book becomes is also a less distinctive thing than the social observation it abandons to get there.

Chapters are separated by emails, news reports and messages from after the voyage, which establish that something went badly wrong.

The device supplies forward pressure and is used sparingly enough not to give too much away, which is a reasonable piece of construction. They also establish a timeframe, so the reader knows roughly how long the voyage has to run before whatever happened has happened.

The cabins are small, the corridors are narrow, and the North Sea in autumn is grey in every direction.

Ware's description of confined space is her strongest technical skill, and the ship is rendered convincingly enough to be navigated mentally. Ware also uses the ship's noise continuously — engines, water, footsteps in the corridor — so that the narrator is never able to establish silence.

The central deception requires several people to cooperate in a scheme with considerable risk, and the motivation offered is adequate rather than compelling.

Readers who examine the plan afterwards will find holes, which is a common feature of the category and is more noticeable here than in the debut.

Fluent and atmospheric, with genuine attention to weather, light and the physical sensation of being at sea.

Ware writes discomfort well — cold, nausea, the inability to sleep — and the physical texture carries a great deal. The seasickness in particular is described with a specificity that suggests direct experience, and it does a great deal to keep the reader inside the narrator's body.

A film version was made, and as with most of this category the interiority that makes the novel work is difficult to externalise.

The book's central question is whether to believe the narrator, which a camera tends to settle by default. The novel's most distinctive quality is the reader's uncertainty about the narrator, and a film that shows the audience what happened cannot preserve it.

Readers who want a confined-setting thriller with strong atmosphere and a well-handled unreliable narrator.

It is Ware's most commercially successful book and not her best. Readers starting with her would do better with In a Dark, Dark Wood or The Turn of the Key. Readers who want the confined-setting thriller at its most atmospheric should start with the debut, and come to this one afterwards if the register suits them.