Do you remember every detail of a book you read in 2017?
All the little stuff, the secondary characters, the red herrings, the subplots, what happened when, the sequence of events?
How about the big stuff, like whodunit, who got killed, who got away?
Gemma Day photo
Ruth Ware’s literary star has risen thanks to bestselling thrillers such as The Perfect Couple, The It Girl and The Woman in Cabin 10.
Ruth Ware thinks you can.
The brilliant British murder mystery author has written a sequel to her 2017 breakout hit The Woman in Cabin 10 that’s short on backstory exposition and assumes you’ve read and can remember her previous books.
Ware has become a star, her recent books such as The It Girl and The Perfect Couple being some of their years’ best murder mysteries.
We have the narrator of The Woman in Cabin 10, English travel writer Laura (Lo) Blacklock, back again, a decade later in book time, this time with an American husband, two little boys, a home in New York and a tentative attempt to get back into travel journalism, a field that has shrunk considerably after mat leave and COVID.
Then Lo gets an invite to go to Switzerland to cover the grand opening of a super-posh resort owned by a reclusive Belgian billionaire. Golly, how did that happen, and how did it happen that Lo’s flight got upgraded to a luxury VIP private cabin with champagne and a bed?
And then when she gets to Switzerland, there are one, then two, then three characters from Ware’s previous book, until finally it’s revealed that the Belgian billionaire is coupled with (pause for suspense) Carrie.
Surely you remember Carrie.
Since we all have word-by-word memory of The Woman in Cabin 10, Lo was on a travel junket in a Norwegian fjord when she saw a woman being thrown overboard, but no one believed her, because they could account for everyone registered to be on board.
And Lo subsequently discovered there was a woman hiding (help us out here, can anyone recall what Carrie was doing there?) in cabin 10 who supposedly didn’t exist, and it was Carrie of questionable morality, and, um, some things happened, and in-cahoots Lo and Carrie ended up in big trouble, or caused big trouble, and saved each others’ lives, and Carrie got away — yet a decade later is still on the most wanted list for having done, well, something, whatever, it was really bad.
The Woman in Suite 11
Remember all that?
More than a quarter of the way into The Woman in Suite 11, we learn Carrie is imprisoned by an evil, powerful man who does unspeakable things with her, and the only way for Carrie to get away is to make a run for it with Lo, by pretending to be Lo, with Lo’s passport and being Lo going through customs and Lo’s lying to the police.
What could possibly go wrong?
Eventually, halfway through the book, we find ourselves in a Ruth Ware novel, thanks largely to Lo’s being hopelessly naïve and being arrested for murder, while we yell at the pages, “Don’t do that, Lo, that’s stupid,” or, “No, Lo, no, she’s playing you,” or “What are you doing? No one in their right mind would —” as the cell door clangs shut.
The Woman in Suite 11 isn’t Ware’s finest work — how many of you clamoured for a sequel? — but once we finally get going, it’s pretty darned good stuff. OK, so you may figure out the ending with 50 pages to go, but it’s still a lot of fun getting there.
Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reads and reviews about 100 murder mysteries each year and can remember every page. Um, Miss Marple is by Sir Ian Rankin, right? And Michael Connelly is the detective on Shetland?