Gianetta Murray, author of Shipped to Slaughter, a Vivien Brandt mystery, is visiting Ascroft, eh? today to share with us why authors can’t resist setting mysteries on cruise ships.
Welcome, Gianetta. I’ll turn the floor over to you –
So many famous authors have done it: Kerry Greenwood, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, and more recently Ruth Ware and Tom Mead.
The rolling swells, the luxurious trappings, and the sneaking suspicion that there’s a buffet somewhere you haven’t found are naturally irresistible to your imaginative mystery writer.
That’s right: they’ve all succumbed to the lure of setting a murder mystery on a cruise ship. So, of course, who was I to argue when I sat down to pen Shipped to Slaughter, the third book in the Vivien Brandt Mystery series.
The idea took root when I went on Alaska cruise in 2022 with my sister and my best friend.
Everywhere I looked, there was a way to murder someone. (This is how mystery authors think; we can’t help it. Don’t ever check our browser history.) Drowned in the swimming pool? Check. Thrown overboard? Check. Poisoned in the fancy dining room and falling face-first into the mousse au chocolat? Check check.
I was even more impressed when I discovered how many people were having trouble getting onto the ship’s WiFi. The challenge for every mystery writer working in a contemporary setting is the instant access to communications. You can always summon assistance if you find yourself in a bad situation and check the internet to confirm just about every smidgen of information. But on a cruise, there are dead spots galore preventing people from calling for help. Genius!
Then there are the meals. Bitter family rivals forced to be polite to each other, or even better, complete strangers thrown together every mealtime, only to find that they might not be strangers at all! Everyone loves a little chaos and cattiness as a side dish to their coq au vin.
Add in hundreds of rooms ranging over multiple decks, common areas including a gym (crushed by weights!), a spa (trapped in the sauna!), and of course the ubiquitous library (crushed by books!) and any killer of average intelligence can hide out for days if not weeks.
At the same time, you also have a classic “closed” location–not unlike the country house cut off by a storm–only no one supposedly can get off a ship except by checking out when it docks. Unless, of course, they’re pushed over a rail…
Is it any wonder mystery authors find it hard to resist such a perfect set-up?
The first two books in the series (Moved to Murder and Dug to Death) are set in a cozy Yorkshire village where our protagonist Vivien Brandt, forty-something California-expat librarian, has moved to live with her charming English husband Geoffrey and stepdaughter Sara. For any Americans who have spent time in the UK, you will know that supposedly sharing a common language doesn’t always guarantee understanding, and Vivien comes a cropper several times as she tries to work out cultural differences at the same time as trying to figure out why these people keep murdering each other.
In Shipped, however, the tables are turned as her English family travels to California to join Vivien’s American family on a cruise and finds themselves utterly confused during everything from the trivia quizzes to the karaoke bar.
With multiple murders and a robbery in the offing, however, they must join forces to overcome their differences and work out whodunnit before the ship docks and an old…let’s say, friend…of Vivien’s is wrongly accused.
And this time, Vivien’s beloved Siamese cat Sydney isn’t around to save her from danger, although the captain’s cat Boris has his own techniques for crime solving…
Will Vivien and her family be able to solve the murders before the ship docks? Will the gorgeous security officer come between Sara and her true love? Will Aunt Gertrude ever admit that global warming is real?
These questions and more are answered in the pages of the latest Vivien Brandt mystery, Shipped to Slaughter, available at https://gianettamurray.com/books and also from most major online booksellers. It is also in Kindle Unlimited until mid-December, and will be listed under additional e-book retailers after that.
Shipped can be read on its own, but it is more fun if you understand some of the running gags from the first two books (such as me constantly indulging my love for Broadway star Jonathan Groff and sidekick Hayley’s desire to write the definitive erotic novel).
Whichever way you choose to read about Vivien and her friends, I hope you thoroughly enjoy it, and thank you for your support!
Thank you for sharing this with us, Gianetta, and good luck with Shipped to Slaughter, a Vivien Brandt mystery. Readers can learn more about Gianetta Murray by visiting the author’s website and her Facebook, Goodreads and Instagram pages. You can also follow them on Threads, Substack and BlueSky.
The book is available online at the following retailers:
About Gianetta Murray: Like Vivien, Gianetta was a tech writer and librarian in Silicon Valley before moving to England to join her British husband and continuing her library career with Doncaster libraries and the NHS. She is now retired to write and to serve her two cats.
