If you’ve ever read one of the hundreds of books and blogs and pieces of particularly literary graffiti on how to write a story, you’ll be familiar with this – overly familiar, to the point it’s a little uncomfortable: ‘write something that completely surprises your readers but also feels inevitable, like there’s no other satisfactory way things could have ended‘.
But for the amount of writers who proffer this advice, very few seem to prescribe to it – and no wonder. It’s hard. But Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is a masterclass on getting this right.
A tightly told thriller and murder mystery, where half the mystery is working out if there was actually a murder, The Woman in Cabin 10 should be recommended reading for anyone trying to write mystery, suspense, or unreliable narrators.