There is a particular kind of reader who discovers a series and immediately feels a pang of sadness that they won’t be able to experience it for the first time again. Rachel Prince readers know exactly what that feeling is. If you are new to the Coral Queen and Rachel Prince, you have a glorious stretch of reading ahead of you. And if you have been with Rachel from the very beginning? Well, Honeymoon Cruise Murder — book seven in this beloved series — is the instalment where everything you have been hoping for finally arrives.
Fifteen books in, the Rachel Prince Mysteries show absolutely no sign of running out of sea.
Where It All Began
It started, as the best mystery series so often do, with a seemingly simple premise. Rachel Prince is an off-duty police officer who finds herself on a cruise ship where she encounters a body. A Cruise to Murder, book one, introduces readers to the Coral Queen, to Rachel’s instincts and her wry sense of humour, and to the ship’s cast of recurring characters. It also introduced Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe, the indomitable octogenarian aristocrat who becomes one of the great scene-stealers of modern cozy fiction.
From that first voyage, it was clear that I had created something with real staying power: a world warm enough to return to again and again, with enough wit, heart, and genuine mystery to keep each new book feeling fresh.
The Voyage So Far: Fifteen Books
For those who want to read their cozy cruise ship mysteries in order — and with a series this rich in character development, that is very much recommended — here is where to begin:
- A Cruise to Murder
- Deadly Cruise
- Killer Cruise
- Dying to Cruise
- A Christmas Cruise Murder
- Murderous Cruise Habit
- Honeymoon Cruise Murder ← you are here
- A Murder Mystery Cruise
- Hazardous Cruise
- Captain’s Dinner Cruise Murder
- Corporate Cruise Murder
- Treacherous Cruise Flirtation
- Toxic Cruise Cocktail
- Cruise into Darkness
- Cruise Fountain Finale
- Fatal Cruise Convention (coming soon)
All fifteen books are available now in eBook, paperback, large print, and audiobook from Amazon, Audible, and worldwide book stores.
What Makes Book Seven So Special
Every long-running series has its milestone moments; the books where something shifts, where the stakes feel higher because the reader has invested so much in the characters. Honeymoon Cruise Murder is one of those books.
Readers who have followed Rachel through six previous cruises, through the mysteries solved, the near misses, the growing friendship with Sarah, and the long, complicated road of her relationship with Carlos, arrive at book seven with a sense of investment that only a series can build. The wedding has been a long time coming. Rachel’s doubts and delays and pre-wedding jitters will feel painfully familiar to anyone who has watched her wrestle with the question of whether to take the leap.
And when she finally does and the Reverend Brendan Prince pronounces them husband and wife in that village church it lands with the full weight of everything that has gone before.
The Characters Who Keep Us Coming Back
A series lives in its recurring cast, and the Rachel Prince Mysteries are extraordinarily rich in this regard.
Rachel herself has grown considerably over fifteen books from the naive, broken-hearted woman of book one to a woman who has faced genuine danger, built deep relationships, and learned (slowly) to let people in again. One of the great pleasures of the series is watching a police officer with no official jurisdiction on board wrestle her instincts into action anyway. She remains fiercely independent, constitutionally unable to switch off her detective’s mind, and possessed of a fitness routine that puts most of us to shame. But she is warmer and more vulnerable than she allows herself to appear. By book fourteen, that off-duty status finally changes when she becomes the ship’s chief of security, a moment long-term readers will find very satisfying indeed.
Sarah Bradshaw — best friend, ship’s nurse, and the series’ great heart is the kind of character readers adore. She turns up in Honeymoon Cruise Murder fresh from six months away, with something clearly weighing on her mind, and proves once again that her loyalty to Rachel is absolute, even when it lands her in thoroughly undignified situations.
And then there is Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe. Marjorie cannot make the wedding in person as her health won’t permit it, but she makes her presence felt nonetheless, arriving by Bentley to see Rachel off at the cruise terminal with a gift that characterises her perfectly: extravagant, thoughtful, and accompanied by a mischievous parting shot that will make any long-term fan smile.
Marjorie has since earned her own spin-off series, the Lady Marjorie Snellthorpe Mysteries, which is testament to just how much readers love her.
Fifteen Books of Sunshine, Suspense, and the Sea
What reader reviews of this series consistently return to, and there are thousands of them, is the sense of escape. The Coral Queen is not just a setting; it is a destination. Readers describe returning to these books during difficult times, during illness, during lockdowns, when they couldn’t cruise themselves and needed somewhere warm and safe to go to.
That is a rare thing for any author to achieve, and it speaks to something essential about what I’m proud to have built here. These are not just mysteries. They are a place to be.
Honeymoon Cruise Murder sits at the heart of this series — past the early books where the world was being established, well before the future destination of book fifteen. It is a book in full flower, confident in its characters and its world, delivering the romantic payoff that readers had been waiting for while finding entirely new ways to complicate Rachel’s life.
If you haven’t yet started the series, there has never been a better time. If you are a devoted reader counting down to the next voyage: Fatal Cruise Convention, book sixteen, is available to preorder now.
All aboard.
The Rachel Prince Mysteries by Dawn Brookes — all 15 books available in eBook, paperback, large print and audiobook. Find the full series reading order at dawnbrookespublishing.com.
