Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Put six crime writers on a train and you have not booked a literary festival, you have assembled a room full of people who have each spent years thinking about how to get away with murder. Benjamin Stevenson knows this, which is exactly why he does it. The corpse arrives on schedule and so does the fun.

What it's about

Ernest Cunningham, the reluctant narrator who survived the family reunion in Stevenson's first book, has been invited aboard the Ghan for a mystery-writers festival rolling across the Australian outback. His fellow guests are a tidy cross section of the genre: the bestseller with the ghostwriter rumor, the debut sensation, the forensic-science expert, the psychological-thriller queen, the elder statesman. By the third chapter one of them is dead, which leaves Ernest surrounded by suspects who all know precisely how these stories are supposed to end.

The conceit is the whole delight. Stevenson writes the kind of mystery that keeps winking at its own machinery: Ernest addresses the reader directly, tallies the clues in plain sight and promises to play fair even while everyone around him is a professional liar. The train setting does the rest, sealing the cast inside a moving box with nowhere to run and a lot of red desert going by outside the window.

Why everyone's talking about it

The first Cunningham book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, became a genuine word-of-mouth hit and got snapped up for a screen adaptation, so this follow-up arrived with a built-in crowd already fond of Ernest's voice. Readers who love a locked-room puzzle that treats them as a co-conspirator have taken to it warmly and the comparisons to Knives Out and the golden-age closed-circle mystery are doing a lot of the recommending.

It hits hardest for people who enjoy a mystery that is playful about being a mystery: the meta jokes, the fourth-wall asides, the sense that the author is grinning at you across the table. If you prefer your crime fiction bleak, atmospheric, or emotionally raw, this is probably not your carriage. The tone is arch and self-aware by design and that is either the charm or the dealbreaker depending on your mood.

The verdict, for now

If the premise made you smile, trust that instinct: this is a book that rewards a reader willing to play along. Start with the first one if you are new to Ernest, then let this be your reward for the trip. Either way, pack it for an actual long train ride and let the outback do the staging for you.