Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect
A Novel
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4.1 • 30 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, a fiendishly fun locked room (train) murder mystery in the spirt of Murder on the Orient Express. With Ernest Cunningham, “Stevenson has brought a modern-day Poirot to the mystery scene”(Michelle Carpenter).
When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.
The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty:
the debut writer (me!)
the forensic science writer
the blockbuster writer
the legal thriller writer
the literary writer
the psychological suspense writer
But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime.
Of course, we should also know how to commit one.
How can you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The classic murder-on-a-train mystery is turned upside down and inside out in Benjamin Stevenson’s ingenious novel. Struggling writer Ernest Cunningham is surprised when he’s invited to join a group of established mystery authors on a train trip across the Australian desert. Ernest’s first book was more of a true-crime memoir, and he’s been hard put to come up with a follow-up ever since—frankly, a real murder would help his situation. Stevenson’s fresh, meta approach to the whodunit is a delight to read, and his observations about writers’ egos and publishing-world politics are laugh-out-loud funny. We loved how Ernest tells you up front how many times he’ll mention the killer’s name and even points out when a detail is actually an important clue. These little teases don’t give the mystery away, but they make it even more fun to play along. Like Stevenson’s previous book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is a must-read for mystery lovers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stevenson's brilliant and creative second closed-circle mystery featuring author Ernest Cunningham (after Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone) toys with golden age mystery tropes while delivering its own hugely satisfying whodunit. Cunningham's published account of the murders detailed in the previous book has netted him an invitation to the 50th Australian Mystery Writers' Festival. He's been asked, along with five much-better-known authors, to be a panelist aboard the Ghan, a luxury train whose route bisects the Australian desert. Soon after the journey starts, one of the writers turns up dead, and each of the train's other panelists—including Cunningham himself—becomes both suspect and sleuth. As the investigation unfolds, Stevenson plays scrupulously fair: as in the previous book, Cunningham addresses readers directly, promising "to be that rarity in modern crime novels: a reliable narrator." Even before the first murder, he reveals that a comma will be a crucial clue, and that there will be more than one victim. Dashes of humor (while introducing his fellow panelists, Cunningham pokes wicked fun at the publishing industry) light the way as Stevenson charges toward the deliciously clever final reveal. This is another triumph from a gifted genre specialist.
