Book Review :: Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson
ISBN: 0143779966
Series: Ernest Cunningham #2
Also in this series: Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone
Published by Penguin eBooks
on 17 October 2023
Genres: Adult, Mystery
Pages: 336
Goodreads

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?

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What is Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson about?

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson is the second book in the Ernest Cunningham series of stories, which follows the main character, Ernest, as he boards the Ghan train across Australia with other authors for a crime book event.

“A bunch of writers in a room requires a collective noun that the English language doesn’t have. A condolence, perhaps. A sympathy. It’s a war hospital for the written word.”

Not that Ernest is a super well-known author with lots of books – he’s just got one that he wrote after the events in the first in this series, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone – but his book was pretty darn good and based on real-life events. For this train ride event, though, he’s alongside longtime award-winning authors, all crime authors, and while he thought it would be pretty non-eventful … the bodies start to pile up.

My Thoughts on Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the first in this series, because I don’t read a lot of crime these days. But the title – Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone – and the description really intrigued me so I picked it up and gave it a go. And loved it.

I thought it was quirky and I thoroughly enjoyed the style of Stevenson’s writing. It’s this interesting style, which continues in Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (and also in the third book – Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret), where you think Ernest is writing it rather than Stevenson writing Ernest, if that makes sense. But it’s not just written in first person; it’s written in such a way that Ernest addresses the reader, breaking the fourth wall.

Which can be super jarring but! I actually had a great time with that first book, so was looking forward to checking out this one.

“It’s not the writing that tells the story, it’s the reading. Words on a page aren’t a legacy until they’re read.”

While the style is the same, the story is definitely not. There are all these crime authors on the train, as well as Ernest’s partner who has also written a book, so when the first crime is committed somewhere in the middle of nowhere Australia on a train … there are many theories and accusations and possibilities as to who did it and why.

Everyone on the train really is a suspect, because it’s a closed-door case or a locked-room case – they’re on a moving train in the middle of nowhere. It had to be someone on the train. Ernest talks with people, he lets us know hints and clues along the way (as we find out he’s writing the ‘book’ from his hospital bed after the events, so we know that he doesn’t get killed and isn’t the murderer), and if you’re smart you can probably put the pieces together and figure it out (a good rule of crime fiction is that you should always be able to figure it out).

This was another great read and I’m looking forward to any other books that Ernest Stevenson writes.

Have you read Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect? What did you think?