Knives, poison, strangulation—ER nurse Darcy Cavanaugh is about to show-and-tell all kinds of deathly dos and don'ts for a mystery writers' workshop at sea. Teaching A Nurses' Guide to Murder in exchange for a Caribbean cruise was a small price to pay for what should have been a vacation in paradise. That is, if she didn't have to share deck space with her boyfriend's uptight mother! Aspiring novelist and wife to a powerful Virginia judge, Mrs. Skyler wishes her son had better breeding prospects than a redheaded Yankee from California. To make matters worse, the Skyler matriarch wants to submit her novel to a merciless agent whose biting criticism is matched only by her squawking, sailor-tongued parrot.

In a crazy twist, a real murder takes place and the judge's wife becomes the main suspect. To protect her boyfriend's mother, Darcy scrambles to peg the real killer from a tangled and nutty cast of desperate writers, overzealous fans, and distracting male cover models with killer abs.