I just wanted something quick and mindless to read and Ruth Ware’s novel The Woman in Cabin 10 ticked the boxes. Kinda sorta.

Travel writer Laura “Lo’ Blacklock is about to go on a five-day cruise, the inaugural voyage of the Aurora, a “boutique super-luxury cruise liner traveling around the Norwegian fjords” and nothing is going to stop her, not even the fact that she recently woke up in the middle of the night to discover a strange man in her flat.

Lo is certain that she can parlay this experience into a promotion at Velocity, the magazine she writes for. At the very least, she might be in line to take over as editor when hers goes out on maternity leave.

As is often the case with first-person narration, Lo isn’t very reliable. For one thing, she drinks a lot. For another, she takes anxiety medication. And she’s already sleep deprived when she boards, due to the aforementioned home invasion. Still, she is determined to make the most of this opportunity, until the woman in the cabin next door to hers (there are only ten on this ship) goes missing. Lo had only met her briefly when she knocks on her door on day one to borrow mascara. (Who would ask to borrow a stranger’s mascara? Yikes.)

Anyway, after a dinner with far too much alcohol, Lo is woken from a dead sleep.

I don’t know what woke me up – only that I shot into consciousness as if someone had stabbed me in the heart with a syringe of adrenaline. I lay there rigid with fear, my heart thumping at about two hundred beats per minute…

What she thinks she witnesses is someone being thrown overboard; what she thinks she sees is blood on the glass partition that separates her balcony from the balcony of the woman next door. When she relates her story to the ship’s head of security, though, he assures her that no one is staying in cabin ten. For the next 150 pages or so, Lo tries to figure out what she actually saw and who this woman is.

The Woman in Cabin Ten is a locked room mystery that takes way too long to get where it’s going, but it’s easy to read and if you don’t read a ton of this type of story, you’ll probably find it fun.

Look for it on Netflix in the coming months.