Thank you to Random House Children's and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of "Cursed Cruise" by Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren in exchange for an honest review.
Following the events of "Horror Hotel" the Ghost Gang has returned to investigate another wildly haunted place, the cruise ship The Queen Anne. The Queen Anne is famous for hundreds of onboard deaths since it was first launched, including the highly publicized "suicide" of an heiress in the 1980s. The heiress, Elizabeth, is now said to haunt the Queen Anne as a Woman in White type ghost. Naturally the Ghost Gang has signed up to join the ship's relaunch following (a supposedly thorough) retrofit in drydock.
Joining them on this trip is Kiki's mother, Billie, who clearly has complicated feelings about how Kiki is managing her life at the moment, and a rival gang of ghost hunters, the Paranormal Patrol. The Paranormal Patrol are the Ghost Gang's exact opposites in every way, so much so that they are basically the GG's evil twin, stopping just short of sporting goatees. At first, it seems like the PP will be important plot component but apart from some possession late in the book, they are really nonentities.
The first thing to know is that the Ghost Gang, made of Chrissy, Emma, Kiki, and Chase, has learned very little from their near fatal experience at the Hearst Hotel. They withhold vital information from one another, they split up to follow ghosts around (predictably nearly dying in doing so), and they make very rash decisions. This silly behavior fuels the plot, kinda, but also makes you wonder how these the people have survived this long.
For so short a story, it packs in a great deal of absurdity. Without too many serious spoilers, the ship is sentient, there may or may not be an Egyptian curse on it because of a mummy that may or may not be stashed onboard (which, if so, the workers mysteriously overlooked during the retrofit.) One of the tragic deaths onboard involved the former ship's chef, who was cooked alive in the ship's walk-in oven by his kitchen staff. There's a little girl ghost who drowned in a pool, and for some reason, ghost of the captain of the Titanic, Captain Edward Smith, is also onboard. He doesn't actually do much apart from leaning on the railing to look for icebergs. (The fictional Queen Anne is supposed to have been built by the same company that built the Titanic. That's all the explanation you get for his presence.) There may be more to Elizabeth's death than authorities previously believed, and the ship makes it very clear that it does not approve the Ghost Gang interfering with any of it.
But fear not, everything gets resolved in a... mostly good way?
The only way to enjoy this story is to really just lean into the ridiculousness. The scares are cheap, there's no real build up of tension, and it's very hard to take seriously any story that invokes an ancient Egyptian curse.* So this is recommended for readers that want a quick and easy ghost story that doesn't make you work too hard and for readers that will embrace the "it's so bad, it's good" humor in the story.
*The 1999 cinematic masterpiece The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, being the sole exception.