Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
By Benjamin Stevenson
- Genre
- Mystery, Crime & Thriller
- Publisher
- Penguin Random House Australia
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780143795650
Ernest Cunningham, a writer of how-to guides for mystery novels, narrates a deadly reunion at a snowbound mountain resort where his estranged family gathers, and where, true to the title, more than one relative has blood on their hands. Benjamin Stevenson's self-aware whodunit plays...
Ernest Cunningham, who writes guidebooks on how to write mysteries, narrates his own - and promises, up front and in the rules of Golden Age detection, that he will never lie to us. Benjamin Stevenson's ingenious whodunit strands a fractured family at a snowbound alpine resort, where a body (then another) forces Ernest to reckon with the title's cheerful admission: everyone here has killed someone. The book is a love letter to fair-play mystery, winking at its own conventions while scrupulously honoring them, so that the clues really are all present for a sufficiently sharp reader. Stevenson keeps the tone brisk and comic without shortchanging the plot's considerable machinery, and the metafictional narration becomes its own source of suspense and delight. For readers who relish a puzzle that plays it straight and does not take itself too seriously, it is enormously entertaining - a clever, self-aware romp that helped revive the classic whodunit for a new audience.