THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10
by RUTH WARE
Gallery/Scout Press: 2016
Hardcover: 368 pages
ISBN: 978-1501132933
Genre: Murder Mystery
Review Source: ARC e-book from Netgalley
★★★☆☆
Woman in Cabin 10 is an Agatha Christie style murder mystery on a tiny cruise ship heading into the frigid waters of Norway. It is summer here in north Georgia and the pea soup humidity and oppressive heat have me heading to my recliner with a glass of ice tea. 
I need an ocean breeze to cool things off. Ready, set, read. When I finished, I felt somewhat disappointed about the ending but nonetheless enjoyed the book.
Laura “Lo” Blacklock, a budding travel journalist, is one of a handful of invited passengers on the tiny luxury cruise ship, the Aurora Borealis, as she sets out on her maiden voyage to Norway. The Aurora, small in stature with only 10 luxury suites, has full cruise line amenities and service staff. The Northern Lights Company and its director, Lord Richard Bullmer, hope to find interested investors and to earn complimentary publicity to further the Aurora’s niche market.
Lo’s apartment is burglarized while she is home just before the launch. The home invasion serves no other purpose than to start the story out on edge. We learn that Lo suffers from life-long panic attacks and chronic insomnia that she treats with antidepressants and copious amounts of alcohol. Despite the untimely severe flare of her panic attacks, Lo heads to the ship self-medicated and hung-over – desperate for sleep. Can you spell C-r-a-n-k-y?
Cabin #9 has been reserved for Lo. As she dresses for dinner she discovers she has forgotten her mascara. Hearing movement next door, she hopes she can get a tube from the resident of Cabin #10. A young woman, dressed casually, answers abruptly, hands a tube of mascara to Lo, and slams the door.
Later that first night, Lo hopes to meet the mystery woman at dinner. The remaining key characters (aside from the crew) in this who-dunnit-it glide, elegantly adorned, one by one into the small formal dining room. There are two tables arranged to seat 12 people. The one empty seat, Lo surmises, is meant for the mystery woman in cabin #10 who has chosen to skip the meal.
Late one night, Lo hears a scream and the sound like something heavy hitting the water. She races to her small balcony and sees what she believes to be blood on the balcony next door and a hand disappearing into the deep. She rings for security and relays what she has seen and heard. A search is conducted but no one, crew or passenger, is found missing.
Unable to get anyone to believe there is a mystery woman aboard the ship and she was murdered, Lo sets out on her own to find clues. The harder she tries to raise the alarm, the more everyone points to her prescribed drug use, insomnia and heavy drinking to discredit her claims. Yet, someone knows what happened! And they let Lo know she was right. The mystery for the reader becomes- Who is warning Lo to “stop digging”?
The climax of the story seemed to me to have too many loose ends. As the story ramps up in the final pages,what was intended to be tension and suspense felt more like chaos and strange. Too many unconnected events. The story could have been improved with fewer characters and more attention to details but overall a quick and easy read.
Most importantly, as expected, the murderer is disclosed..or were they?
Not one to waste time, I immediately turned to my oldest and dearest friend: Google. After…countless generations suffered this fate before me…[all searching] for the best way to deal with the rejections, the heartache, and that longing to spend the days with [The One], it should be known by now.
Timber Press
Head out to the forest with Alamanzo and his axe as he clears land for a new home, fields for the crops and domestic animals. As the years progress, observe his willingness to experiment with crop rotations and research new agricultural equipment to expand and improve their livelihood.
This dynamic work doesn’t end at Rocky Ridge Farm on the Wilder’s front porch where Almanzo and Laura enjoyed their waning years. It continues with several chapters that include a tour guide to the Ingalls and Wilder homesites today and a handy table listing all the flowers Laura mentioned in her books along with citations to each referenced. Bonus. Sources of heirloom seeds is provided for the inspired gardener.
When people ask me what I do…I tell them I work in an office. [I work] for a graphic design company…Bob, the owner [must have felt sorry for me]. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience…I showed up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.
The victim has been identified as Lucinda Hayes, a ninth-grade student at Jefferson High School.
ls of the people. She introduces us to, later famous, musicians that she knew as just “local talent”. It’s not long before you want to be adopted into the larger extended family… a family that accepts you warts and all.
ice…[I stood] observing the whole floor of the dimestore through the one-way glass…Thus I learned the position of the omniscient narrator…it was the perfect early education for a fiction writer.
is yachting shoes, inadequate footwear for a 600+ mile trek, he meets many side characters that provide levity, sorrow, inspiration and friendship. Memories of better times become loosened from a locked place his mind and by the time he reaches 
reaches the end of land and faces the ocean. As she walks into the water to drown herself, she stops herself when she discovers the mysterious life beneath the water. She finds an abandoned house on the shore and begins creating a massive sea garden with representations of persons and events from her past. Along the way she finds she is able to make friendships and to live a simple quiet life.
ERS
East’s companions on this delicate mission are his 14 year-old gun-crazed estranged half-brother, Ty, the 20 year-old happy go-lucky devil-may-care, rule flaunting, up-and-comer, Michael Wilson, and the mysterious “pumpkin-shaped” 17 year-old computer geek, Walter. This motley crew of land pirates was hand selected by Fin and as they stand around awaiting their travel orders, it is obvious from the get-go that there is no love lost among the group.
Ingram Best of the Best
Kirkus Starred Review
I had gone into the hospital to have my appendix out…And then a fever arrived…About three weeks after I was admitted… I found my mother sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed…I had not seen my mother for years, and I kept staring at her…….
I highly recommend checking it out if you are having pain! Don’t wait four months like I did – depriving myself of some good backpacking and hiking weather.
As a matter of fact, this morning I waddled pain-free to my kitchen (thank you, Percocet), put my cup on the platform, slapped a coffee pod in the machine and not once but twice. checked to see if coffee filled my cup. Nope. Then I realized it was the sound of my left leg grinding away. I hadn’t selected a cup size.
I was Under-The-Influence of Social Anxiety. The political atmosphere nationally has soured my disposition and way-laid my mental ability to rise above the drama. What I need is Mental Peace and Quiet. So I had made a promise to myself. Less Screen-Less Screams-Less Bad Dreams.
If anyone has a recommendation for books like Man Called Ove, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, or The Snow Child send them my way.
When news of the Klondike strike reached Nellie Cashman in 1897, ” she put together a $5000 grubstake” and hot footed to the Chilkoot Trail. “Arriving in Dawson, City, she opened a store in the basement of the Hotel Donovan and a restaurant called Delmonico….She acquired No. 19 Below Discovery on Bonanza Creek and it proved a prudent investment. All That Glitters, pg 46
self-confessed bibliomaniac with more books than sense.
on this page?
hor: Pepper Harding
the Sombrero Galaxy, which actually did look like a sombrero, and this led him to recall something that had been drilled into his head since junior high school, namely that life travels at 186,000 miles per second, and when you look at a distant object, say, the Sombrero Galaxy, what you are actually seeing is how the object appeared millions of years ago (in the case of the Sombrero Galaxy, thirty million years ago) and not how it is now; in fact, who could say what it looks like now?
ng to arbitrary and indefinite detention, and that men, women
serve as a maid, caretaker to an elderly family member, and an in-house oddity. In 1854, upon the death of her charge, the child left to return to her native tribe. Somewhere in that journey, she was discovered by an American showman and was convinced to join him for a life in the world of human curiosities thus enabling her to fulfill her dreams of seeing the world outside her small village.
In the real world, one well-known New York medical authority examined her and declared she was a half-breed of human and orangutan origin. This wasn’t a new idea. Two hundred years earlier a Dutch doctor stated that orangutans were born “from the lust of Indian women, who mix with apes and monkeys with detestable sensuality”.
It stopped me in my tracks as I knew they represented the yin and yang of the American Justice System. Was it conceivable that they were friends outside their hallowed chambers? What was my little 5 ft tall Jewish icon of Women’s Rights doing hanging around the man that declared that the constitution didn’t bar sex discrimination?
Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.
that Justice Ginsburg will not be deterred by tweets or taunts. She will stand with her principles and continue to represent all of us to the best of her ability. Highly recommend reading.
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“THE ADMIRALTY’S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.” 
ssengers and supplies, Larson reveals the life of the Lusitania from inspiration to shipwreck.
cond Mrs. Hockaday
The other two weekends place her in the back of a stretch limo, alone, to arrive at the luxurious Bridgehampton estate of her mother’s boyfriend. Incongruously parked at the formal entrance of the main house is her plastic electric Power Wheels pickup charged and ready for her first tour of the estate grounds.
Abduction?…
While living in Harlem, Harlan discovered his inherited music talent following in love with the guitar. When he dropped out of school at 16 to pursue a musical career, Lucille took him on band tours through the United States. With little supervision and poor adult role models, Harlan found drugs, alcohol and sex. These new vices drew him deeper and deeper in their grasp until he no longer was reliable to the band. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you; Lucille fired him.
I remember being pestered by a sense of dread as I walked to my car that day, pressed down by a wave of foreboding that swirled around my head…If I had known how that drive would change so many things- would I have taken a safer path?
The first time I water-skied (and stayed upright) I remember the exhilarating thrill of being pulled up rapidly onto the surface of the water and the feeling of flying out of control in the wake of the boat.
The Sunlight Pilgrims
There are three suns in the sky and it is the last day of autumn-perhaps forever…
lin’-drift
Dylan McRae, 38, mourns the recent deaths of his mother and grandmother. If his heavy grief wasn’t burden enough, he learns their home and source of family income, an old London movie theater named Babylon, has gone into bankruptcy. His mother’s will contained surprising news of a caravan he now owns in a small Scottish caravan park in the middle of God knows where. She asked that he spread both women’s ashes in a remote Scottish village, his grandmother’s birth place. Gathering up what belongings he could fit into his mother’s old suitcase including Grandmother Gunn in an ice cream container and Mum in a sandwich box he heads north facing the rapidly approaching deep winter. His plans are to sell the caravan after fulfilling his mother’s last request and head back south to some where warm like Vietnam or Cambodia.
This is one of those times. The lives of these two remarkable women will affect you forever.
found in tip-top shape, it spirals nose down into the Atlantic.
The highway ahead lolled in sunlight.
It was mine and it made me happy. It didn’t bother me that it was mine because no one else wanted it.
For some strange reason, I never considered what it would be like to be forty…And yet here I am. It’s my mother’s funeral, and if that’s not enough, I’m forty…Illness evicted her from her throne so cruelly in the end, it completely destroyed her kingdom, and pretty much screwed us all up one way or another.
ather built a grim little factory that supplied urea to fertilizer manufacturers. His disgraced father had been reduced to a dealing in pee. “Not even real honest piss – artificial piss. Faux pee. A nitrogen-carrying ammonia substitute…”
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