Read by Alex Lee, this audiobook interested me because I published a cruise ship murder mystery myself some months ago and I was curious to know what another author would do with one. This one with a Christmas theme sounded like it might be fun, but I was wrong! My bad! I could not stand this novel and I ran from it after about five chapters. There were two problems. One was the reading voice of Alex Lee which I did not like at all, but even had the voice been magic in my ears, I still would have given up on this because of the writing style.
This is the first book in a series and I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of series as a general rule, but the first problem here for me is the absurdity of the premise - that a female police constable (later a detective constable and presumably later a sergeant and so on) goes on seven cruises and on every one there is a murder! I'm sorry but no. This is just as stupid as the woman who retreats in disarray to her ancestral home, opens a cupcake shop in this tiny village, and then finds it's the murder capital of the world. No! By far the most common crime on cruise ships is sexual assault, and even that is rare. The truth is that there are 25 times fewer crimes on a cruise ship than in your typcial city - at least as far as an American survey indicated. Maybe Britain is just the opposite....
So this Brit police officer, Rachel is looking forward to this cruise to the Canary Islands with her new fiancé. Her old fiancé is long gone, but evidently makes an appearance in a later book. I guess Rachel's life is just improbably brimming with coincidences. Her plans are scuppered when her new fiancé is called away to Italy to solve a hotel crime. I guess the Carabinieri are completely incompetent.
Another improbable coincidence is that, on the bus journey to the dock at Southampton to get on board, Rachel ends up not only speaking with the murder victim (the ship's Maître D) before he's murdered, but also gets her hands on his wallet which he conveniently leaves behind him on the bus, and which, unless I missed it (I listened to this while driving so my attention wasn't always focused on the story), Rachel never turns in and the Maître D never misses!
Another annoyance was the obsession the author seems to have with people's hair. We always get a hair description no matter how irrelevant it is. To me, unless the person's papeparance is critical to furthering the story it really doesn't matter what they look like and a brief sketch is plenty for me. To go into too much detail or worse, to do a Stephen King and deliver a not-so-potted history of the person's life is an annoyance because it brings the story to a screeching halt for no reason at all. I do not like that kind of writing.
The book description itself tells us what's wrong with this: "Rachel can't resist snooping once she suspects an element of foul play" Snooping. That's the operative word, including breaking into a crime scene with no authorization whatsoever. If the cruise people had asked for Rachel's help, that's one thing, but it's not her jurisdiction. It's the jurisdiction of the Hampshire Constabulary, since the murder took place while the ship was docked and is, as far as I could tell, discovered before the ship has even left British territorial waters.
I thought this might be different from your typical 'cozy mystery', which I avoid like SARS-CoV-2, but no! Even though the main character is a police officer, it turns out that she's still an interfering person who withholds evidence and breaks the law in her selfish and crazed pursuit of a murderer. In fact, one could argue here that so many murders take place around her that she's somehow a trigger for them, and in light of this, ought to be banned from cruise ships altogether. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.
