Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

A Novel

De: Benjamin Stevenson

Narrado por: Barton Welch, Megan Smart

From the bestselling author of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, a fiendishly fun locked room (train) murder mystery in the spirit 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?

A satisfying sequel

I enjoyed Stevenson’s first nifty take on the mystery genre enough to want to read the second. It doesn’t disappoint - in fact, it might even be better than the first. The “writers’ festival on a train” set-up works well, and I think the plot is very cleverly executed; it feels tighter than the first. And Ernest is a delightful narrator - funny, self-deprecating, and at times introspective. I was surprised to find myself with a few tears near the end. This was a binge listen.