By Dennis Fischman
There’s a name we in the Somerville Public Library’s mystery book group have given to a certain type of mystery novel. We call it “a murder cabin.”
The murder cabin is a descendant of a type of classic mystery from the Golden Age of Mystery, a hundred years ago. In those celebrated novels, a group of people have been collected in an isolated place: on an island, as in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, or in a country house (like Peter Wimsey’s family home, Riddlesdale Lodge, in Clouds of Witness). Somebody gets killed – perhaps, more than one – and only the people in that place can be the suspects.
Today, in the age of cell phones and the internet, it’s harder to keep your suspects in one place and prevent them from conspiring with outsiders (or calling for help!) You must invent a weather disaster that makes communication impossible. Or, the one who severs all the electronic connections with the outside world has to be the murderer.
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The Woman in Cabin 10, by Ruth Ware. Thorndike Press, 2016,
The contemporary murder cabin mystery also shares some features with (oddly enough) the contemporary cozy mystery. The heroine and sleuth tends to be a young-ish woman, working in a small shop or a niche field. Her love life is a mess. And she gets thrown into solving the mystery either to clear her own name, or that of a friend, when the legal authorities are on the wrong trail.
These days, the mistress of the murder cabin thriller is author Ruth Ware. Back in 2015, she wrote In a Dark, Dark Wood, with a group of friends on vacation in the English countryside. When one of them is murdered, they are stuck with one another until they figure out whodunnit. Let me say that the murderer is the type of personality I think I might have met once or twice in real life and feel grateful never to have rubbed the wrong way (shivering). I disliked pretty much all the characters but still wanted to know what had happened, and all the clues were there in case I had been smart enough to put them together properly.
Ware followed up her début novel with The Woman in Cabin 10. This time, the cabin is not a log structure in the woods but a suite on a luxury liner, heading out from Britain into the North Sea.
One of the guests is Lo (Laura) Blacklock, an aspiring journalist who has taken a turn in her career and works for a travel magazine.
One of the guests is a woman whom Lo meets her first night on board, and never again. This bothers Lo tremendously, because the owner, the captain, the security chief, the staff, and all the other guests say they’ve never seen the woman she’s talking about. And, that first night, outside the mystery woman’s cabin, Lo heard the sound of a splash…
One of the guests is not who they seem to be. And at least one of them is a murderer.
As with the previous book by Ruth Ware, I enjoyed this one and wouldn’t stop reading it until the end. Lo Blacklock, despite multiple problems with mental health and addiction, was someone I could care about (and I’m pleased to see that for the first time ever, Ware has returned to one of her characters – Lo stars in The Woman in Suite 11, to be released in 2025).
Still, I felt the book could have been trimmed by about a quarter if Ware could resist telling us in detail about how it feels to have a monster hangover or having your head bashed against a wall, etc. But that is my taste, and I know other members of the book group who want to follow the Perils of Pauline – sorry, the low points of Lo Blackstock – in detail. Whether your tastes are more like theirs or like mine, however, this book will keep you flipping the pages.