The Woman in Cabin 10 Study Guide

Ruth Ware grew up in Sussex on England’s south coast. She studied at Manchester University and lived in Paris for a while before settling in North London. Before becoming a full-time writer, she also worked as a waitress, an English teacher, and a bookseller. Though she enjoyed writing stories from the time she was a little girl, writing remained a hobby until she was in her thirties, when she began working on novels while her two children were in school and found her first publishing success. Her bestselling mysteries include In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Lying Game.

Ware’s novel is part of a resurgence of the thriller genre that could be dated to Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller Gone Girl and may reflect a broader cultural fascination with true crime stories. Such thrillers often feature female protagonists, domestic strife, and psychological suspense. The pervasiveness of the internet and smartphone technology is another feature of the novel. After every few chapters, Ware includes emails, Facebook posts, or online forum posts discussing Lo’s whereabouts, which illustrate the degree to which these tools have become indispensable to daily communication and one’s ability to access news and information—and also how they can harmfully fuel speculation. Lo’s inability to access the internet during the cruise—which cuts her off from loved ones and also forces her to solve the mystery without outside help—underscores this. The novel also makes reference to the common but underreported phenomenon of cruise ship crime, which, because it often occurs in international waters, is frequently subject to murky maritime laws and overlapping police jurisdictions.

Ruth Ware’s mystery plots have sometimes been compared to those of the “Golden Age” detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934), for example, features detective Hercule Poirot solving a murder case aboard a luxury train. Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train, features two train passengers whose lives become entangled when one of them, a psychopathic manipulator like Richard Bullmer, convinces the other to “swap murders” with him. In more recent fiction, Paul Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train (2015) also features a thirtysomething narrator who witnesses something shocking, but whose reliability is questioned because of her drinking.