Review: "Seasick" by Kristin Cast and Pintip Dunn

Seasick by Kristin Cast and Pintip Dunn
Published June 2024 via Delacorte Press
★★

Well, this is my second recent stuck-on-a-boat-and-people-keep-dying book. Or, to be even more accurate about it, a stuck-on-a-boat-with-a-bunch-of-extremely-spoiled-and-unpleasant-rich-people-who-keep-dying book. And I think this is...more than enough for me for a while. I love a locked-door mystery, but I'm on record many times as having poor ability to suspend disbelief, and this book requires far more advanced skills than I have.

In Seasick, a bunch of teenagers are set loose on a yacht with a full staff and some amount of alcohol and almost zero supervision—the yacht staff are not there to supervise, and it's pretty much minutes before they're out for the count anyway. And from there bodies start piling up, in increasingly gruesome fashion (and with a variety that would take some effort from the most hardened of sociopaths, to say nothing of any of the passengers on this yacht).

I think I mostly just read this too close to The Yacht to have all that much energy for it, but I also struggled quite a lot with the motive and the characters. A lot of the characters (not all, because it's YA and thus there is romance) are written to be actively unlikable, which in some circumstances I appreciate but in mysteries/thrillers I don't love—because I like to be scared that characters will die, not relieved when it happens because I no longer have to give them brain space.

It's really hard to discuss motive without spoilers, so spoiler warning for this paragraph: It comes down to money, and the difference between inheriting two billion dollars and one billion dollars. And I'm sorry, but what can you do with two billion dollars that you can't do with one? A billion dollars isn't worth killing for when you will still end up with a billion dollars if you do nothing.

So not a good fit for me, but again, it was always going to be a hard sell for me given the high suspension of disbelief required; it'll be a better fit for readers who don't have that particular character flaw.