Murder on the S.S. Cleopatra: Luxury, Secrets, and a Classic Closed Circle Mystery

🚢 What secrets unravel when a murderer strikes aboard a Nile steamer? 

In this special bonus episode, I take you behind the scenes of my new mystery novel, Murder on the S.S. Cleopatra, the second book in the 1920s Lady Traveler in Egypt series.

🔎 I share how Blix and Hildy's tranquil cruise turns into a classic closed-circle whodunit filled with secrets, intriguing characters, and plenty of 1920s flair. 

🤫 I give you behind-the-scenes research tidbits, talk about the special edition features, and let you know how to get the book or audiobook.

If you love whodunits with rich settings, this episode is for you—happy sleuthing!

🏺Murder on the S.S. Cleopatra Special Edition: https://sararosettbooks.com/collections/murder-on-the-s-s-cleopatra

📚For more classic whodunits, check out my books in print, audio, or ebook: 

High Society Lady Detective series 

🕵️‍♀️ 📦 Cozy Books Corner Subscription Box (affiliate code), a book box curated for cozy mystery readers.

➡️ Use code SaraR5 and get 15% off! ⬅️

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast. I'm Mystery Author Sarah Rosette. This is a bonus episode and it's all about murder on the SS Cleopatra.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Murder on the SS Cleopatra is book two in the Lady Traveler and Egypt series. But before we get into that, it's been a minute, so first of all, hello. I hope you've been reading some good Who Done It and really fun mysteries. Today I'm going to tell you about the second book in the Egypt series. But before we do that, let's do a quick recap. For those of you who followed the lady traveler Blix Windway in her last adventure in Cairo, you know all about the murder she got mixed up in and solved, of course. But after all that excitement, Blix and Hilde, her traveling companion, decided that Obnal cruise sounded peaceful and a great way to see more of Egypt. And what better place to find tranquility and relax a little bit than aboard a luxurious steamer? The SS Cleopatra is part of the Blue Lotus steamer line, which is completely fictional. But if you've seen Death on the Nile adaptations, I know you can picture it. It's cabins paneled in mahogany and brass sconces and views across the Nile, elegant dinners, which all sounds idyllic, right? But if you know me, I couldn't let them simply have a quiet holiday. They had to have some intrigue and some mystery mixed in there. As I mentioned earlier, Wick has her traveling companion with her, Hilde. She's the older woman, she's very wealthy, and she has this fondness for ostentation fashion with plenty of feathers and glittering jewelry. They are just sailing into their cabins when the intrigue begins. So I'll give you a little preview of the first chapter so that you know what the book's about. Wix finds this mysterious note in her cabin. It's written on the steamer's layer head, and it is, as she would say, quite vile. But of course, in her gorgeous British accent, which I won't attempt. Oddly, Kilby, who is typically astute, she quickly dismisses this as something left by a previous passenger, and she tears it up and throws the fragments into the Nile when she thinks that Blix isn't watching her. So that gives Blix a very uneasy feeling. Her reaction sets off alarm bells for Blix. So that's the beginning of the intrigue, and it goes on from there. Another familiar face is back in this book. Prickly Rafe Briarcliffe is back, but he's traveling incognito for reasons that will go unnamed for now because I don't want to spoil anything major. So I'll just leave it at that. That's a little taste of how it starts and some of the characters. But as you might have guessed, when passengers start dying aboard the steamer, Blix finds herself in the middle of another mystery. It's a classic closed circle mystery, which means all the suspects are on this steamer, and it had to have been somebody on the steamer. So it's a closed circle. Nobody else could have done it. And there's plenty of suspects. You have a captain of industry, a former stunt girl reporter, an archaeological scholar, a recovering invalid who has insisted on making the journey and going on every excursion despite her husband's concerns. Her husband is a doctor who's aboard the steamer and they're traveling so she can recover in the climate of Egypt. I'll just stop there and say I had so much fun writing this one. I really loved writing about this closed circle world of the Nile steamer where secrets are hard to keep. To solve this one, Blix will need all of her noticing sort of person skills, as Rafe puts it, to unravel the truth. I loved learning about the steamer, learning about what the journey on the Nile was like. I'll give you a couple of research tidbits of things that I learned while I was writing this. There actually was a steamer called the Cleopatra on the Nile, but it's not the same as my fictional steamer, and there was no blue lotus steamer line, as I said before. I did research quite a few of these and I found that there were some very large ones, there were some smaller ones. This is past the time when they would take the smaller boats up and down the Nile. If you've read any Elizabeth Peters, they have their own sort of private boat. I'm not going to attempt to pronounce it because I'll probably mispronounce it. But if you've read any of those books, you know the type of boat that they would have taken in. And the steamers were larger, but there were still some small ones that would accommodate this number of suspects. So that's why I designed it that way. And I found some floor plans of steamers and modified them so that I knew what was happening in the book. There's several several of my sketches are in the book that I use to keep everything straight. There, let's see, what else did I do? I really researched what life was like on the steamer. There was a preset schedule usually for these tours where they stopped at certain locations and they stopped a lot. They would go to the bazaar to shop and they would buy antiquities, rugs, scarves, fly swatters. They would buy, they were called what we would call sunglasses. They called them smoked glasses because the lenses were dark, like the color of smoke. They would tour famous sites along the way. And so I included some of those stops. They had some tombs that they would visit. And then another interesting thing I learned about this time on the Nile, the steamers communicated with each other. So as they were traveling, sometimes steamers from the same company would stop and swap supplies, messages, they had ways they signaled each other, and they would stop for the night at different locations. And sometimes people would go visit other people on another steamer and have dinner and then come back to their own steamer for the rest of the journey. And there was a lot of competition among the travelers to find the best deals. I read a bunch of firsthand accounts of travel on the Nile. And one of them was this woman who was thinking about buying a carpet, and she she couldn't decide if she wanted it or not. So she was like, I'll think about it and I'll come back tomorrow and get it if I want it, want it, really want it. And then that night she goes to dinner at another steamer, and somebody has purchased the carpet that she wanted, and it's on that steamer, and they're talking about it at dinner. So I thought that was a funny little vignette of something that happened on a journey. Basically, these were little floating enclaves of mostly Brits, Americans, Europeans traveling and interacting amongst themselves. They didn't have a whole lot of interaction with the people that lived in Egypt, except for the people who worked on the steamers and whoever they met when they were shopping or touring the sites. Of course, Death on the Nile was an inspiration. I wanted to write a mystery set on the Nile, but I didn't want to do exactly the same thing that Alec Christie had done. So my story is different and has some different elements to it than hers did. But one thing that stays the same is that someone dies on the steamer, and then I had to research what happens to a body if you're on the steamer. Normally in Egypt, there's a very quick burial because of the heat. But in my story, the dead body stays on board the steamer because no one wants the hot potato of the dead body. So every time they try and offload it at some place along the way, those officials say no, take it down to Luxor, let them have it in at Luxor. So they put it in cold storage until they arrive in Luxor. And they did have cold storage in these steamers. I had to research that and make sure that was possible. Let's see, another interesting thing about this story. Let me put it this way. If you wanted to know more about Blix, Hildi, and Rafe, and their backstories, this is where you're going to find those details. Secrets are revealed. Hildi is not just an eccentric, wealthy woman. You get more of Blix's backstory and more of Rafe's backstory. Uh, when I started writing this book, I was a little stuck at one point. I couldn't figure out quite what I wanted to do at certain points in the story. And one of my writer friends said, Why is Rafe in Egypt? And I was like, I don't know. It's one of those things that sometimes you start a book and then you work things out, or a series and you work things out as you go along. And I don't always know all the details. I have a general idea, but I couldn't figure out what brought him to Egypt. But as I was writing the story, I figured it out. So you'll get his story and find out those details about what brought him to Egypt. That is a little bit about murder on the SS Cleopatra. You can get it at Sarah RosetteBooks.com. If you're listening right now in August 2025, there is a special edition available at Sarah RosetteBooks.com. There is a hardcover, it has sprayed edges, marbled and papers, color interior with the color on each chapter heading. It has photos of the characters that capture what I think the characters would have looked like. It has their I found photos that I felt gave a little bit of the characters' personalities as well as what they would look like. And there's maps, there's my hand-drawn sketches that I used while writing the book. There's a blue ribbon bookmark that's part of the binding, so you can use that to mark your place in the book. There's also a special edition paperback, but it does not have the sprayed edges. It has the color interior and all the special features like the maps and the photos. That's all in the paperback. And then there's an audiobook version as well, and that is available now. I always get the question when will the audiobook be available on Audible? And I do not know. I have no control over that. This is not available on any retailers right now. So if you're listening in August 2025, you can get it on my store. If you're listening later in the fall, there will be a pre-order, and then it will be available on all of the normal retailers like Amazon, Barnes Noble, but it will be the regular edition. Amazon and all these other printers and ebook stores can't do these special editions with all these special bells and whistles. So it will be black and white interior. It will have, I think, two maps, and pretty much that's it, because they're not really set up to print special editions. And then the audiobook will be available on Audible whenever Audible decides to release it. I have no control over that. All I can do is upload it, and then they release it on their schedule, and they don't let me know what that's going to be. So hopefully it will not be long. But if you want it now, you'll be able to get it early at my store. And then if you look for it and it's not on Audible, it will be available on my store. The audiobook will not go away. The special edition print copies are only available for limited time, but the audiobook will always be available at my store. So if you can't find it, go to servers at books.com. And if you're listening later, you can also find it at your local library. The digital version will be distributed to Hooplaw and Overdrive, so look for it there, or request it from your library if you don't see it in the library catalog. Librarians love it when patrons say, I want to read this book. They've told me that if somebody asks for it, it goes to the top of the list of the books purchased. So if it's not there, just ask a librarian and they can get it for you. I hope this podcast has given you a behind-the-scenes look at Murder on SS Cleopatra and enticed you to give it a try. If you've enjoyed the podcast, I hope to tell us all in this true review. And if you can't get enough of the 1922 Dennis, check out my high society lady detective studies and ebook audio or print at SarahRosebooks.com.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

And happy flipping, and I will see you next time.