The other day, Lisa Marie and I watched The Mystery Cruise.

Regan Reilly (Michelle Harrison) is the daughter of mystery novelist Nora Reilly (Colleen Winton) and a respected private detective in her own right.  Her friend, Alvirah (Gail O’Grady), has just won the lottery and wants to open up a detective agency with Regan.  Regan doesn’t think that the flighty Alvirah would be a good partner.  Along with their husbands, they set sail on a mystery cruise that is being used to promote Nora’s new book.  Every passenger on the cruise is trying to solve a fake murder but Alvirah thinks that one of the passengers is plotting a real murder!

This Hallmark movie was dumb and silly and kind of fun as long as you didn’t demand too much from it.  I actually liked Regan and Alvirah’s husbands (played by Peter Benson and Larry Miller) more than I liked either of them.  The mystery was easy to solve and it was clear that the movie wasn’t mean to be taken seriously.  My sister and I agreed that a mystery cruise was the sort of thing that we would enjoy doing but we couldn’t agree on which one of us would be Regan and which one would be Alvirah.

This movie was based on a book written by Mary Higgins Clark and her daughter, Carol Higgins Clark.  Sadly both of them have since passed away but, as we watched, Lisa Marie and I remembered how our aunt used to have an entire closet full of Mary Higgins Clark novels.  It was a good memory.