A Bet at Sea: Who Slipped Us Another Mystery?

By Ladi Brown

Rudi Braunstein is a retired journalist with a gift for sarcasm and truly terrible timing. His wife Hani is a retired swim instructor with a sharp wit, a sharper eye for detail, and zero patience for his nonsense. Together they've built a perfectly quiet, perfectly ordinary life in Wisconsin. So when they book a relaxing cruise from Mallorca to Cape Town, all they're hoping for is sunshine, decent wine, and eleven blissful ports without a single crisis.
The ship had other plans.
A passenger vanishes before the welcome cocktails are even finished. A suitcase shows up with no owner and no explanation. A volcano appears to relocate itself overnight. A sommelier knows far too much about everything except wine. And somewhere on a beach in Namibia, a single footprint leads to absolutely nowhere - which, Rudi points out, is at least consistent with everything else on this trip.
Port by port, the Liberty Belle stops feeling like a vacation and starts feeling like a floating true-crime podcast that Rudi and Hani accidentally signed up to co-host. Naturally, they can't resist. Somewhere between the buffet and the lifeboat drills, they discover that solving a mystery is a lot like staying married for decades: it requires patience, timing, a good sense of humor, and the ability to still like each other in a cabin roughly the size of a coat closet while the whole ship pitches sideways.
A Bet at Sea is a breezy, banter-forward cozy mystery for anyone who wants their whodunit served with a glass of local wine, a rolling horizon, and a couple who bicker their way - cheerfully, relentlessly - toward the truth.
Perfect for readers who enjoy amateur detectives who probably shouldn't be doing this, marriages that run on sarcasm and mutual exasperation, and vacations that go hilariously, mysteriously wrong.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H84YHBBD
• ISBN13: 9798186298250
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"