What do You think about Santa Cruise: A Holiday Mystery At Sea (2006)?
I bought a copy for 50¢ at a thrift store and read it on the plane home from Amsterdam -- only because I was trapped for 9 hours and had tired of watching movies.This is bad even my cozy standards, and cozies are not meant to be great literature.Every character is stupid and annoying. There is no mystery to the reader, as the identity of the criminals is shown to the reader very early in the book. The plot is built on dozens of near-miss incidents and the characters are stereotyped. Seriously, it was like reading an episode of the Love Boat -- but with less likable people.
—Lisa Shafer
Mary Higgins Clark moves away from some of the more suspenseful shockers such as "Where are the Children" to coauthor with her daughter Carol Higgins Clark this lovely enjoyable tale of a Christmas time voyage. Its a classic Murphy's law - what can go wrong will go wrong! The story about the post-Christmas voyage starts with the self-styled Commodore rambling about his plans and his goals for his just completed refurbished yacht. He plans to run a cruise line, and is using this post-Christmas cruise to jump start his business. To do so, he is going to give gratis a tour to several diverse good-doers and prize winners. Things start going wrong right away, and we get to watch as the locked room mystery, vanishing Santas, and a bad storm mix and mingle the crew and passengers. Add in a ghost and some horrid brats, and the tale is underway. The events lead the crime fighting guests, including bungling amateur sleuth Alvirah Meehan, to stumble into the truth but along the way we are treated to many amusing side trips down comedy lane.
—Doris
MHC is one of my go to authors. Normally she delivers a great mystery read in my opinion. This one however, just was not up to par. Alvirah Meehan won a cruise for people that had done good through out the year. She had her friends the Reilly's (Nora, Luke, Jack, Regan) all join her. This was the maiden cruise for the Royal Mermaid. The Commodore nephew, Eric, had hid two escaped convicts on this ship. Also in the makes is something suspicious going on with Mr. Crater.I just had a very hard time getting into this story--I don't know if it because all the story lines were predictable or if it just was not that appealing---like the blooming romance between Ted and Maggie.So overall, it was an okay story, nothing that exciting as I found it pretty predictable even with reading about Fredericka and Gwendolyn - which they did a good job on making they annoying!
—Elizabeth Noah Astle
