Ben and Erica are on another mission to apprehend Murray, this time from his evil scheme to blow up the Panama Canal (a plot eerily familiar after the March 2021 Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal) using a cruise ship with a nuclear engine.
This time, Ben has no idea his only role is bait to draw Murray and his Hulk of a henchman, Dane Brammage, out. Ben goes undercover with Erica, her parents, Alexander (spy-underwhelming) and Catherine Hale (MI6 spy-extraordinaire), and best friend Mike. They're supposed to be one big happy, vacationing, Aloha-shirt-wearing family on a cruise leaving from Nicaragua.
They encounter Dane's cousin, a Hulk-look-alike who's a bodyguard for the wife and daughter of the bad guy Ben put behind bars in the last book, and now it looks like they're up to something no good on the cruise ship, but Ben and company have no idea what.
They're just stupefied that Dane has a cousin. And they start to relax.
Bad move.
Ben's been spotted and they're tricked by Murray almost right after they leave port. Dane — yes, he's still alive (he's beginning to remind me of Alvin the Treacherous) — throws Ben overboard and Mike thinks fast and launches a lifeboat to save Ben. Which he does, with amazing speed and accuracy in the big wide ocean. The boys make it to land, end up the "guests" of a local drug lord who flies them to the next port so they can get back on the big boat and figure out what Murray has up his sleeve…besides killing Ben. That's a given.
And they have to deal with an overly chipper teen events coordinator on the cruise!
I won't spoil how it ends, or the big plot twist at the end. Just know, Gibbs does a great job skewering the cruise industry, what it does to local ports and the horrific working conditions of many cruise employees / staff, with his descriptions and the plot. I've never taken a cruise, so I enjoyed reading all the descriptions of cruise-doings and cruise-goers. They were the source of multiple laugh-out-loud bursts as I read. Enjoy!
