Author: Benjamin Stevenson
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction (mystery, humor)
Pages: 336 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): Australia
Summary: 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: I enjoyed the first book in this series Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (link to my review) so was looking forward to a good chuckle as I read this one. I was not disappointed.
I really do enjoy these humorous mysteries, and Benjamin Stevenson does them so well. I liked the allusions to Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, the feeling that the narrator is talking to the reader, and the big speech at the end where each person's motivations and actions are revealed by the narrator. The Epilogue is clever, too, I just can't tell you why as that would spoil things.
Having a train full of mystery writers is a good plot idea since they all have experience researching murder, crime, police procedures, and they are all intertwined in some way. It keeps the reader guessing (thought the narrator does keep us informed of "murder mystery rules" as he moves through the novel) and makes for good plot twists.
If you are a fan of the Richard Osman novels and similar books, you'll enjoy this one.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Bookish--Characters are all mystery writers
- Cover Love--mode of transportation (train)
- 20 Books of Summer
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