I read Santa Cruise: A Holiday Mystery at Sea by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark immediately after The Christmas Thief. Since it employed the same characters I was familiar with everyone but that wasn’t the only thing the two books had in common. As I remarked about the earlier novel, Santa Cruise was more of a comedy than a suspenseful thriller, and a weak one at that.
The cruise in the title is a promotional freebie which was organized to drum up publicity for a new ship. The passengers were chosen because they had been charitable or otherwise outstanding citizens over the past year and the cruise sets sail right after Christmas. Ten Santas were to roam the ship to provide a joyous feeling of good cheer, however two of the men hired to dress up cannot fulfil their duties when they discover that two of the Santa suits have gone missing.
I didn’t care about the two stowaways who wear the missing Santa suits in order to disguise themselves on board. They were able to board the ship via their shady relationship with the commodore’s nephew, Eric. A booking mixup left Eric no choice but to hide the stowaways in his own room, which he happens to share with his uncle. Throughout the novel Eric is moving these Santas all over the ship in an attempt to hide them from all crew and passengers. I never felt that his temporary hiding places were realistic: hours under a table in the ship’s chapel? Really? And they are left starving for the duration of the cruise, picking up stray hors-d’oeuvres or whatever Eric can carry back to wherever he last dumped them to hide. They didn’t act like any reasonable person stuck in the same predicament, simply because they were always subservient to the whims of Eric. If I was a seasoned criminal crouching for hours in dark cramped rooms and on top of that starving for hours on end, I’d say to hell with Eric, and I’d fend for myself for the rest of the cruise.
The other passengers included wannabe detectives who always found themselves in the right place at the right time, overhearing snippets of conversations that turned the action on its side so conveniently. They were not convincing and unfortunately not likable either.
The only memorable line in the novel was this description of an older gentleman. I liked the geographic reference to his physiognomy:
“Willy, her husband of forty-three years who, with his white hair, map-of-Ireland face, and generous girth, was the living image of the late, legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill…”
This novel held no suspense and left me without a care whether the two stowaway Santas would be captured or not. With the pair of Santas racing up and down between decks and trying to find places to hide, the story was better suited as a screenplay for a seventies sitcom than as the suspenseful mystery it was billed as.