Hello hello, and welcome or welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet. Today I’m sharing my review of Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect, the second book in the Ernest Cunningham series. You can read my review of book one, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, here.
Synopsis
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?
Review
Rating: 3 stars
Following on the disastrous family trip to the mountains where we first meet Ernest Cunningham in book one, this time we see him take a rail trip across Australia, and being held up as a debut crime author. He wrote his book based on his experiences of what we see in Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, and now he’s hoping to follow up his debut with a crime fiction novel. But then someone gets killed.
It’s an interesting concept for a book; put a load of crime fiction writers and fans together on a train, and see what happens. Add in a dash of death and there should be even more invested by all involved.
I did enjoy the book, and it was told with the familiar sarcastic wit from book one. I listened to both of the books as audio books, and the narration is one of the best parts of this series, in my humble opinion. It really helps bring the characters, and especially the character of Ernest, to vivid life, with the brilliant humour that seems to be a well-established rule of a lot of Australian fiction.
The characters are a mixture of the eclectic and the utterly dull, which creates a fruit salad of people. The guests all want to meet their favourite author, and some are even fierce to defend them if they feel they are being challenged by others. The authors and agents we encounter are enough to put you off wanting to go into publishing in any way overall, or at least want to self publish, and never want to deal with anyone in the bookish world ever again. This kind of satirical look a the publishing industry is very popular at the moment, and I think we’re seeing a lot of small truths hidden in stories.
All that said, I found the story to be quite convoluted. All mysteries have to be somewhat twisted, and I love a mystery that keeps me guessing, then all comes together at the end. But this just… didn’t. It was not so much far-fetched as impossibly-fetched, and the solving of the mystery was all a bit absurd. It wasn’t based on little details throughout the book; rather, it was just by chance. And not in a “wow, we were building up to that weren’t we?” kind of way. I found this really frustrating, both as a mystery lover, and as someone who did really enjoy other aspects of this series and set of characters. It was just a bit of a disappointment, and I don’t know whether I’d pick up the next one.
Thanks for stopping by to read this review today; every view really does make a difference. YOU, if you’re reading this – YOU make a difference. To make even more of a difference and never miss another post, drop me a follow below. Have a great bookish day!
And On She Reads 