"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. A man who never reads lives only once." Jojen - A Dance With Dragons
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Finished: The Woman in Cabin 10 (Ware). This was a perfect page-turner for travel reading, but not as good as one of my Harlan Coben thrillers. It was nicely suspenseful, but a little slow in getting started. It's the story of Lo Blalock, a journalist who works for a magazine. She's sent in place of her female boss, who is on maternity leave, to cover an intimate, super-luxury cruise on a private yacht. The yacht is owned by a wealthy businessman who is providing this maiden voyage to potential investors and journalists to make sure the business is a success. The catch is...the wealthy businessman is only wealthy because of his wife's money. His young wife, who has just survived a four year battle with breast cancer is on board. One her first night on board, Lo hears a scream and a huge splash from the cabin next to hers, a cabin which is supposed to be empty. Lo goes out on her balcony and sees a woman's body sinking in the North Sea, and she sees blood smeared on the balcony glass next door. Of course, by the time the yacht's security arrives, there is no blood and no body, and no one believes her...especially because she was pretty inebriated that evening at dinner. There are about ten other guests on the voyage, so Lo runs through them all as possible suspects in this murder she's sure she witnessed. She is also warned to quit "digging" and threatened, so she knows she's not imagining things. The tail is rather twisty, but it does turn out that no on on board has ever met the rich wife, so as she appears at the yacht dinners, weakly and apparently bald and recovering from chemo, no one suspects that it's not really her at all. Lo finally figures it out. She figures out that the body that went overboard was actually the real wife, and that the person pretending to be the wife is in cahoots with the husband. The fake wife then locks Lo away in a cabin below and when all the other passengers disembark at the journey's end, fake wife tells them that Lo disembarked earlier. Lo is actually able to get through to the young woman, who has been physically abused by the husband and feels like she has no chance but to go along now. Lo convinces her that once the husband is successful in getting his wife's money, that she, the fake wife, will be next on his list of victims. Together, they concoct a plan to have Lo escape and fake wife stay there to handle the husband, pretending that Lo knocked her out and fled. In another twist, it is reported that the husband is found on the yacht with a gunshot wound to the head....apparently suicide...or is it? Lo is extremely worried about what could have happened to fake wife. A few weeks later, Lo gets a deposit into her bank account for $40,000 Swiss francs, and she realizes that the young woman made it out alive and has access to all the money. So...a pretty good tale, but not the best I've ever read. :-)
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