REVIEW: The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware
Ruth Ware has pretty much been an autobuy for me since The It Girl , which I believe is the first of her books that I read. I only read The Woman in Cabin 10, Ware’s second thriller and the prequel to this book, earlier this year. I still have two of her backlist to read and expect I will get to them sooner or later. None of Ware’s books have really knocked it out of the park for me, but they’ve been solid – all straight Bs or B+s, if I’m not mistaken.
I was anticipating The Woman in Suite 11 especially. I think this was because sequels are, in my experience, rare in suspense (unless it’s of the detective-mystery-series variety). I liked the protagonist, Lo Blacklock, pretty well in the first book. I generally find Ware’s protagonists a little bland. But in this case I liked the idea that I “knew” the character going in and could be plopped in the story without a lot of set up.
Lo is British but now lives in New York with her husband, Judah (her boyfriend in book one) and two young sons. It’s been 10 years since the events of The Woman in Cabin 10, but Lo is still occasionally beset by nightmares about her experience (which totally made sense to me; I don’t vibe well with stories where the main character is threatened and abused and walks away with no apparent mental scars). Lo wrote a well-received book about her ordeal. She is now trying to get back into the game as a travel journalist, which was her vocation before marriage and motherhood. Lo is finding that the current landscape for travel writers is fairly grim, post-pandemic and post-many-negative-developments for journalism as a career in general.
Lo is therefore intrigued and pleased to receive a mysterious invitation (which should have been her first clue; mysterious invitations never bring anything good in this kind of story). She has been asked to attend the opening of a luxury hotel near Lake Geneva. The Hotel du Lac is the cornerstone of a foray into the travel industry by the Leidmann Group, headed by mysterious billionaire Marcus Leidmann. Lo gets an idea – if she can get an interview with the reclusive Leidmann, and sell it to the Financial Times, she may be able to parlay this into an actual job offer.
Lo is nervous about leaving Judah and her children, but it’s also nice to get away alone, and going to an luxury hotel in a beautiful location doesn’t hurt. She plans to tack on a couple of days in England at the end to visit her mother. She’s a bit confused when she’s unexpectedly gifted an upgrade to first class on the flight over. That would have been enough to get my spidey senses tingling, if I were Lo.
There are more Bad Signs when Lo arrives at the chateau – three of the other journalist guests were also on The Aurora, the yacht in the previous story. Lo is disquieted by this seeming coincidence but forges ahead. She is pursuing her interview with Leidmann, but he doesn’t even appear at dinner the first evening. She gets to talk to his son Pieter, who strikes her as a pale imitation of what she imagines is a magnetic and charismatic man – Pieter himself seems very average and bit underwhelming.
When Lo goes back to her luxurious room after dinner, beset by jetlag, she is jolted by a note directing her to another room. She finds out from the front desk that the room is Marcus Leidmann’s, a realization that reinvigorates her. So she hies off, hoping her interview might actually happen. Instead she finds a woman, someone Lo knows. It’s then that things start to go seriously south.
I’m not going to identify the other woman, because the blurb doesn’t, but her identity may be obvious to anyone who has read The Woman in Cabin 10. I may already be saying too much! But it’s impossible to talk about anything beyond the 20% mark of the book without delving into spoilers a little bit.
Anyway….
The woman tells Lo that she needs her help – she has been Marcus Leidmann’s mistress for the past ten years. She alludes to dark secrets – Leidmann is apparently controlling and abusive. There are hints that he passes her around to friends to be sexually abused. The woman appeals to Lo because Lo owes her – literally, she saved Lo’s life once.
What follows is a foolhardy flight across Europe, an extremely ill-advised stay at another luxury hotel, this time in England, and Lo being accused of murder.
Again, a lot of this is hard to talk about without delving into spoilers. The murder mystery isn’t particularly interesting or surprising, and though The Woman in Suite 11 was compellingly written, I honestly spent most of the book thinking that Lo was being incredibly dumb. I get it that she doesn’t *know* she is stuck in another thriller, but she has gone through all this before. She is not nearly wary enough, especially of Marcus Leidmann, who she has been told is vengeful and violent, and who she very well knows is powerful and rich enough to interfere with her back in New York. Lo gives a lot of lip service to concern and worry about her young children, which makes her lack of care even odder. There are holes in the plan to help the other woman escape that you could drive a truck through. I can’t emphasize enough how much time I spent going, “seriously, Lo? Really?!”
However, it says something about my involvement in the story that rather than thinking the author was making Lo behave in ways that were extraordinarily dumb, I thought, “wow, Lo is behaving in ways that are extraordinarily dumb.” That is to say, the character came alive for me enough that I attributed her behavior to her rather than the machinations of the author. I’ll give The Woman in Suite 11 credit for that because it’s one of my standards that determines whether a book worked for me. And so I’ll say that I do think this book worked for me, but at the same time Lo’s character fell in my estimation because her behavior was so dumb. So dumb. Still, I’ll give this book a high B – it’s a very readable thriller about a very dumb woman.
Best,
Jennie
AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle
I , too, believe that Lo was incredibly nieve, but some folks are, nevertheless, I LOVED THE BOOK. The ending was perfect. I look forward to reading Ms. Ware’s other books.