BEST BOOKS ON... CRUISES

THE author suggests novels to help with the last weeks of winter... IF I WERE a rich woman, then February is when I would seek out winter sun. I would flounce off to the Caribbean or find a forgotten bit of myself in India. Prior to departure, I would shop designer ‘cruise collections’ — and be so fancy I would actually know what those were.

But I would be wary of actually taking a cruise. You see, in novels there are few surer ways for a moneybags to meet their maker than boarding a ship with ‘strangers’.

‘Do you really like Majorca, Mother?’ asks the idler Tim Allerton in Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile. ‘I was thinking of Egypt . . . Real warmth, darling. Lazy golden sands. The Nile. I’d like to go up the Nile, wouldn’t you?’

Fast forward to the intimate steamer S.S. Karnak voyaging towards Nubia, with passengers including honeymooning heiress Linnet Ridgeway, Jacqueline De Bellefort — the childhood friend whose fiancé Linnet stole — and Hercule Poirot. What could possibly go wrong?

Passenger ships make such a clever story vessel because they can — as in the film Titanic — become a microcosm of society.

Rachel Rhys’s riveting Dangerous Crossing unfolds during a six-week journey aboard a ship bound for Australia on the eve of World War II. Lily is a pretty, lower-middleclass Londoner who gets taken up by a fast, first-class crowd.

It opens at its journey’s end: the boat docks in Australia and a beautiful woman is arrested — but who is she and what is her crime?

Another recent page-turner is Ruth Ware’s bestselling The Woman In Cabin 10.

Journalist Lo Blacklock thinks a luxury Northern Lights cruise will be just the tonic for recovering from a harrowing break-up. But, awoken by screams, she is certain she sees a body bundled overboard. In the morning, she is assured no one is missing from the passenger list. So, is it really Lo who is losing it at sea?

Honestly, you’re so much safer travelling in an armchair.