As many of you know, psychological thrillers featuring kickass ladies are just about my favorite thing ever, and when I got my grabby little hands on The Woman in Cabin 10 I was super excited. It’s a creepy locked room mystery with an amazing narrator, a couple of good red herrings, and lot of delicious twists. The mystery maintains a good pace too, and once I started reading I had to finish that same day. It would have been a one-sitting book except I started it before work and had to, you know, actually show up.

It’s also a big ‘ol middle finger to gaslighting and to dismissing women with anxiety or depression as “crazy” or untrustworthy, and let me tell you, I loved that so much.

Our intrepid narrator/sleuth is Lo Blacklock, a writer for a high-end travel magazine, Velocity. When her boss is laid up with a complicated pregnancy, Lo gets to step in and go on a once-in-a-lifetime luxury cruise aboard The Aurora. This isn’t a city-at-sea type of cruise, oh no: it’s a small luxury boat with only ten cabins intended to cater to the wealthy traveler. Departing from England and sailing to Scandinavia, it’s all about designer meals, epic spa treatments and views of fjords and the northern lights. This is a cruise I want to go on (well, up until the murder part).

Lo needs to cover this assignment as it’s a huge boost to her career, but she’s struggling. Immediately before the cruise her flat was robbed, while she was in it, and understandably she’s not sleeping well.  So she’s sleep deprived, dealing with some serious anxiety, and she may have broken up with her boyfriend right before she left. The maiden voyage of The Aurora is devoted to journalists and wealthy investors, so it’s the sort of networking opportunity that could spell big things for Lo which is why she pulls on her big girl pants and shows up.

The first night of the cruise Lo realizes she’s forgotten her mascara, so she knocks on the cabin door next to her (the titular Cabin 10) and a young woman answers. She gives Lo some mascara–everyone has smoky eyes, it’s all good. That night Lo finally falls asleep only to be woken up by a scream and a splash. She runs to the balcony and thinks she sees someone slipping under the water. When she cranes her head around the privacy barrier between their balconies, she swears she sees blood on the railing outside cabin ten.

When security comes they are baffled because cabin ten was empty–they even show her the unprepared room. The man who was supposed to stay there was an investor who backed out last minute. Also there’s no blood on the railing. In an effort to allay her fears they introduce her to all the female crew (she’s met the guests) to see if one of them was the woman she saw earlier in the day. Of course none of them match up. Lo is dismissed, but she’s firm in her conviction that what she saw was real.

This book deals a lot with gaslighting, and I loved that so much. For those unfamiliar with the term, gaslighting is when someone is manipulated into doubting their memory or experience, and it’s a thing that happens to women when they are legitimately distressed about something and then told that distress is not valid.

Here’s Lo speaking to the head of security:

“Lo, then. I have spoken to the captain. None of the staff are missing, we are quite certain of that now. We’ve also spoken to all the staff and none of them saw anything suspicious about that cabin, all of which leads to the conclusion–”

“Hey,” I interrupted, hotly, as if somehow preventing him from saying the words would affect the conclusion the captain had come to.

“Miss Blacklock–”

“No. No, you don’t get to do this.”

“Don’t get to do what?”

“Call me ‘Miss Blacklock’ one minute, tell me you respect my concerns and I’m a valued passenger blah blah blah, and then the next minute brush me off like a hysterical female who didn’t see what she saw.”

“I don’t–” he started, but I cut him off, too angry to listen.

“You can’t have it both ways. Either you believe me or–Oh, no, wait!” I stopped in my tracks, unable to believe I hadn’t thought of it before. “What about CCTV? Don’t you have some kind of security system?”

“Miss Blacklock–”

“You could check the tapes of the corridor. The girl will be on there–she must be!”

“Miss Blacklock,” he said more loudly, “I have spoken to Mr. Howard.”

“What?”

“I have spoken to Mr. Howard,” he said, more wearily. “Ben Howard.”

“So?” I said, but my heart was thumping fast. “What can Ben possibly know about this?”

“His cabin is on the other side of the empty one, I went to see him, to find out if he could have heard anything, if he could corroborate your account of a splash.”

“He wasn’t there,” I said. “He was playing poker.”

“I know that. But he told me…” Nilsson trailed off.

Oh, Ben, I though, and there was a sinking sensation in my stomach. Ben, you traitor. What have you done?

I knew what he’d said. I knew it from Nilsson’s face, but I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.

“Yes?” I said, through gritted teeth. I was going to force him to do this properly. He was going to have to spell this out, one excruciating syllable at a time.

“He told me about the man in your flat. The burglar.”

“That has nothing to do with this.”

“It, um–” He coughed and folded first his arms, then his legs. The picture of a man his size, perched uncomfortably on a sofa, trying to efface himself into nothing, was almost ludicrously comic. I said nothing. The sensation of watching him squirm was almost exquisite. You know, I thought viciously, you know what a shit you’re being.

“Mr. Howard tells me that you, er, you haven’t been sleeping well, since the, er, break-in,” he managed.

I said nothing. I sat there cold and hard with rage against Nilsson, but mostly against Ben Howard. That was the last time I confided in him. Would I never learn?

“And then there is the alcohol,” he said. His fair, crumpled face was unhappy. “It, um… it doesn’t mix well with…”

He trailed off. His head turned towards the bathroom door, to the pathetic pile of personal belongings.

“With what?” I said, my voice low and hard and totally unlike my own. Nilsson raised his eyes to the ceiling, his discomfort radiating through the room.

“With…antidepressants,” he said, his voice almost a whisper, and his gaze flicked again, to the crumpled, half-used packet of pills beside the sink, and then back to me, every inch of him apologetic.

But the words were said. They could not be unsaid, and we both knew it.

I sat, saying nothing, but my cheeks were burning as if I’d been slapped. So this was it. Ben Howard really had told him everything, the little shit. A few minutes, he’d talked to Nilsson. One conversation, and in that time he’d not only failed to support my story–he’d spilled every detail of my biography that he had to hand, and made me look like an unreliable, chemically imbalanced neurotic in the processes.

Yes. Yes, I take antidepressants. So what?

No matter that I’ve been taking–and drinking–those pills for years. No matter that I had anxiety attacks, not delusions.

But even if I’d had full-blown psychosis, that didn’t detract from the fact that pills or no pills, I saw what I saw.

You can’t see me, but I’m holding up a lighter here. The scene goes on with Lo bitching out Nilsson for making false assumptions and for not doing his job properly. It. Is. Glorious.

There is this awful thing that happens to people who suffer from anxiety disorders or depression. When I went through my years of trying to get fibro diagnosed, my doctors kept falsely pointing to the generalized anxiety disorder I’d had since I was a child (and been medicated for since I was a teen) as the cause of my chronic and often debilitating pain. Or rather the cause of me thinking I was in pain when I wasn’t. When I finally saw a specialist and got diagnosed, he told me this was a common thing for a lot of his patients.

Here’s the thing–depression and anxiety make your brain lie to you. It tells you that you aren’t good enough or strong enough to cope or that things are worse than they really are. It does not make you think you saw someone being murdered when you didn’t. Anxiety and depression are very common mental illnesses and they don’t typically cause hallucinations–it’s a difficulty in coping with reality due to a chemical imbalance, not an inability to tell what that reality actually is, and not a deficit of character or judgement.

My anxiety made it difficult for me socialize sometimes or to cope with what might be considered a normal amount of stress. It doesn’t make me untrustworthy or delusional or in any way less lucid than anyone else. If anything, anxiety/depression might make a sufferer better at examining their emotional state and how it relates to events. Like, I know when I cry at a Proctor & Gamble commercial during my period that it’s because my hormones are wonky–I don’t suddenly assume P&G commercials got really sad.

Nilsson acts like Lo’s sleeplessness and antidepressants mean that Lo can’t be trusted to differentiate reality from fantasy, and the fact that she calls him on it is perfect. This is a common theme in mysteries/ thrillers/ horror fiction–you must be crazy! There’s not really a killer/ monster/ alien/ bigfoot hanging out here! Ooops I just got my face eaten, guess you were right. The thing is, most heroines don’t deal with their doubters are directly or forcefully as Lo.

As the novel progresses Lo keeps pushing to find out who was killed and who the killer is, and clearly someone is not happy with her. Threatening messages are left for her. Potential evidence is destroyed. The more this escalates the more exhausted Lo becomes, but she never really questions her own sanity. There are moments in this book that would have broken me, but Lo perseveres.

If you want to read this book, but are leery, The Woman in Cabin 10 isn’t a particularly gory or scary  mystery. It’s very suspenseful, and there is real danger at times, but I don’t think it’s nightmare-inducing. It is incredibly smart, well paced and well-plotted. Plus, Ruth Ware does a great job of creating this claustrophobic, moody atmosphere that enhances everything about the suspense.

The Woman in Cabin 10 would get an A from me based on the merits of the mystery alone–the fact that it takes a long, hard look at gaslighting and declares “fuck you,” is just a wonderful added bonus. I know many SBTB readers love mysteries and thrillers, or know someone who does, so if that’s you, I cannot recommend this book enough.