Jessica Fletcher finds herself in an incredibly compromising situation, awakening on a lobster boat adrift in Cabot Cove to discover she's not alone: there's a dead body aboard.

Jessica soon finds herself in a swirling investigation that involves the sleepy town of Cabot Cove and its lobstermen. The town wants to throw a gala pageant to attract tourists, and the town's board wants the lobstermen to hold off selling recent harvests in order to serve the inevitable demand. The fishermen are not pleased with this strain on their livelihoods. Tempers begin to flare, but no one could foresee that the escalation of accidents and mishaps would end in murder... with Jessica at the center of it all.