Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson | book review

【 EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT 】

Genre: Crime Fiction
Audience: Adult
Author: Benjamin Steveson
Published: October 2023
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Pages: 352 (paperback)

As with the first book, I have no qualms and thoroughly enjoyed this hilarious and action-packed mystery.

This has no end of excellent publishing and writing puns – so for anyone in the industry, I can guarantee many, many chuckles throughout. The humour is wry and on point, and I couldn’t guess the ending, which always makes a mystery better in my opinion!

I loved all the nods to his ‘rules’ of mystery writing, the way the classics (Christie and Conan Doyle) handle things (not to mention the surprising amount of restraint at only a handful of subtle references to Murder on the Orient Express), and the constant toying with the reader about whether Ernest truly is a reliable narrator.

It’s just fun to read, is really all I can say. Every page is funny and I’m only sad it wasn’t longer. I sure hope we get a book three! But the self-awareness of the difficulty of sequels that is constantly ribbed out throughout this book has me lowering my hopes that a third book will come. My fingers are crossed.

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Title: Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect
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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?