There is a particular kind of friendship that only fiction can fully honour. It’s the kind that goes beyond shared history and mutual affection into something rarer and more resilient. The kind that survives secrets, arguments, disasters, and the occasional dead body turning up at extremely inconvenient moments!
Rachel Prince and Sarah Bradshaw have that kind of friendship.
Over fifteen books, and counting, the bond between Rachel Prince and the Coral Queen‘s ship’s nurse has been one of the great pleasures of this series. It is not the flashy centrepiece of the story, overshadowed as it sometimes is by murders, mysteries, and the complicated business of Rachel’s love life. But it is the emotional backbone of every book, and nowhere is that more evident than in Honeymoon Cruise Murder, where both women arrive at the start of the voyage carrying something they haven’t yet been able to share with each other.
The Chief Bridesmaid
The book opens with Rachel’s wedding, and Sarah is right at the heart of it; first among the bridesmaids, as she should be. The two women grew up in the same village, have been best friends forever, and their parents are friends. Sarah has been part of the fabric of Rachel’s life in a way that goes far deeper than circumstance. When Rachel finally walks back down the aisle as Mrs Jacobi-Prince, Sarah is just behind her, exactly where she belongs.
But even in the joy of the day, Rachel notices that something is off. Sarah has been different over the past week: more distant, quieter than usual, and carrying a weight she hasn’t shared. The two friends have barely had a moment alone together in the run-up to the wedding, always surrounded by family and preparations and the relentless logistics of a big day. Rachel files the observation away. She will ask, eventually. Just not today.
It is a wonderfully observed detail — the way close friends can sense a shift in each other even when there’s been no time to talk, even across the noise and happiness of a wedding day.
Protector and Protected
The friendship between Rachel and Sarah is not one of equals in the conventional sense — they have very different personalities, different instincts, different approaches to the world. Rachel is sharp, self-contained, athletic, and driven by a compulsion to solve problems that she cannot always switch off even when she desperately wants to. Sarah is warmer, more expressive, quicker to laugh and quicker to lose her temper, with a generous heart that sometimes gets her into trouble.
What makes them work so beautifully is the way they take turns looking after each other.
When Sarah spots Rachel being cornered by her unwelcome cousin Keith at the wedding reception — an old acquaintance with a long-standing and very unwanted interest in Rachel, she is already heading across the room to intervene before the photographer redirects her. That instinct to protect, to read the situation from across a crowded room and move without being asked, is entirely characteristic of Sarah. And when she learns that Keith has announced his intention to join the same cruise, she storms off with the focused fury of a woman who will not allow her best friend’s honeymoon to be ruined, if she has anything to say about it.
What She Carries
One of the things Honeymoon Cruise Murder does with particular skill is show us Sarah from the inside as well as from Rachel’s perspective. We see her arrive on the Coral Queen and settle back into the ship she loves — the familiar smell of Gwen’s percolated coffee in the medical centre, the delight of Bernard knocking on her cabin door with his own teabag and six months’ worth of ship’s gossip, the pleasure of a freshly refurbished ship after a long absence.
But underneath all of that warmth and familiarity, something is clearly wrong. The past six months, spent working in a busy critical care unit in London while the Coral Queen was in dry dock, have taken more out of Sarah than she has let on. There is an anger simmering below the surface; an anger that flares when Keith’s behaviour crosses a line, and that occasionally spills in directions that surprise even Sarah herself.
Rachel sees it. She always sees it. But on a honeymoon, with a body in the pool before the first morning is over, finding the right moment to ask is harder than it sounds.
The Conversation on the Sun Lounger
There is a scene mid-way through the book that is as good an example of this friendship as anything in the series. The two women finally find a quiet corner of the upper deck, a pair of sun loungers away from the noise of the pool, and Sarah tells Rachel what she knows about the dead man and her last, angry exchange with him.
Rachel reassures Sarah with the easy, absolute conviction that only a true friend can deliver: “Sarah, you’re my best friend. You could ruin nothing as far as I’m concerned.” And Sarah’s single-word response: “Ditto”, says everything that a longer speech could not.
It is a small moment in the middle of a larger plot. But it is also the heart of the book.
Why This Friendship Matters
In a genre where the sleuth’s intelligence and instinct tend to be the dominant force in the story, the Rachel and Sarah friendship offers something different: genuine emotional texture, the kind that builds across a long series. Readers who have been with these two women from book one carry with them the full weight of what they’ve been through together; the dangers they’ve navigated, the arguments they’ve had, the moments where one of them has been in genuine peril and the other has had to act.
Sarah is not a sidekick. She is a fully realised person with her own story, her own professional life, her own relationships and loyalties. The fact that her story intersects with Rachel’s in ways that are personally painful for both of them makes the more emotionally demanding books in the series, the most rewarding.
The Coral Queen carries thousands of passengers. But for readers who have come to love this series, the two most important people on board are almost always Rachel Prince and her best friend, navigating whatever the voyage has in store for them.
Together, as always.
