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I’m not sure where to begin, but know there are some light spoilers below. The best way to sum it up is that this isn’t a Murder, She Wrote novel. It’s a spy thriller disguised as a MSW novel. It was decently written—for a generic spy novel—but not for Jessica Fletcher. Despite being attached to the Commerce Department on this adventure, Jess herself ironically has zero agency, as she’s strung along by governments and subversive operatives the whole time. Jessica’s “decisions” in this book are actually just the cleverly disguised machinations of secretive government men. Nothing gets answered, Jessica plays the role of begrudging patriot, and a friendly face in the form of George Sutherland conveniently makes an appearance in the end to put everyone at ease. It was just a bunch of moving around from place to place with very little worthwhile actually happening.

This is also the second time that clandestine, conspiratorial governments have taken center stage as the means and the culprit of the story. It’s overblown for a MSW. Jess is at her best with a close cast of characters and tension coming from what is at first a growing list of suspects that dwindles down. International intrigue doesn’t ring “cozy” or MSW to me. I didn’t even care about the murders. I just wanted Jess to get home so the book would end.

This book will inspire in you an interest in the small or forgotten towns across America as much as it inspires in me an interest in reading more of Bill Bryson's travel books. Meaning, it won't. And for all the wrong reasons. Bryson's humor in his depiction of some of the locations he visits may possess a kernel of truth, but he largely comes off as resentful towards the places, hateful towards the people, and unfunny in his observations of them both. There were some times where I got a laugh, but it wasn't at the fat jokes, or the women jokes, or the fat women jokes. It wasn't at the derision and disgust of homeless people. It wasn't at how boring he said everything was over and over again. It wasn't at the irony of his disdain for tourists.

Bryson is uninterested in truly discovering anything about the places he goes or making any truly humorous observations about them that don't rely on denigrating every aspect of those places, and that makes me so uninterested in discovering anything else Bryson has to write. What else can I say that other 1-star reviews haven't already said.

The first and only other Bryson book I read was A Walk in the Woods. Go read that, if you care to, then find another travel writer.

Unlike the steady course of the titular ship, this book had stops and starts throughout. Setting the story aboard a massive ocean liner--practically a vessel-set city--was an interesting premise. The convention of using Jessica as a shipboard playwright was novel. But this rendition fell short in many of the ways the other installments do. Namely, the net was cast a bit too wide in trawling for all the characters Jessica meets. There must have been nearly a dozen people introduced and whose names and roles I had to recall. Jessica's sailing companion was a bit too chummy and too similar to Jessica herself, almost making her redundant. The time required for the ship security to review camera footage was hardly believable. And of course the involvement of Jess's white knight George Sutherland felt like yet another deus ex machina contrivance to wrap things up neatly. Jessica might be looking forward to a do-over of her crossing after this, but I'm not.

What a surprise this book was. An adaptation of the guilty pleasure movie we all know and love, this story gives us a much deeper look at the characters while staying perfectly true to the source material. Some people reading the book will not like peering into the minds of the characters to see what makes them tick, the thoughts of a bunch of teenagers and 20-somethings in the background of a summer camp slaughter. If you're just after the kills, I recommend skipping this and watching the movie instead. But if you care to know why Alice and Steve had that weird tension we see in the film, or what maybe pushed Ned to act like such a goof-off all the time, or what drove Steve Christy to reopen the camp after so many mysterious and tragic incidents, then you'll get that and more in this novelization of one of the earliest mainstream slasher films, iconic for introducing us to the legend of Jason Voorhees.