The Book:
Everyone on This Train is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson
(Ernest Cunningham #2)
Published January 30, 2024 by Mariner Books
Date read: July 7, 2024
Find more January 2024 new releases here.
Everyone on This Train is a Suspect spoilers can be found below, but they’re hidden under a spoiler tag so you’re safe to keep scrolling if you’d just like to read my review.
The Characters:
See the beginning of the book, there are a lot!
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The Plot (from Goodreads):
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?
Everyone on This Train is a Suspect Spoilers
The Reveal:
Henry had raped Lisa. She was distraught when she saw his name on her book cover, not overjoyed.
Brooke was their child. Ernest could tell she wasn’t staying in a guest cabin because she was sunburnt on an arm that indicated she was staying on the writers’ side of the train rather than the guests.
Lisa had fought with Henry but didn’t kill him. She realized she was the prime suspect, though, and tried to run.
Harriet Murdoch was the killer. Jasper had been Henry’s ghostwriter for years, and Harriet was angry that he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved. She thought that if she killed Henry, Jasper could get the credit for publishing the last novel in Henry’s series posthumously.
I can’t remember why Wyatt was killed.
The Ending:
After Ernest revealed his findings to the passengers, he ended up in a standoff with Harriet on the roof. Jasper sacrificed himself to take her down, rolling them both off the train to certain death.
Royce was arrested for covering up Lisa’s rape. Douglas was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm (he had intended to kill Henry, thinking Henry had done the actions in one of his books which resulted in the death of Douglas’s son. Henry stole that plot though). Brooke inherited Henry’s estate.
Jasper did die, but Harriet didn’t. She tracked Ernest down and tried to kill him, but Juliet showed up in time and knocked her out. Ernest was stabbed in the stomach but survived.
I hope these Everyone on This Train is a Suspect spoilers were helpful.
The Review:
I quite enjoyed this follow-up to Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. (If you can’t remember how that one ended, check out my spoilers here!) I enjoyed seeing where Ernest turned up. He’s a successful author now, but he has a second book due and is struggling with writer’s block.
My thoughts on this book were pretty similar to the previous book. I loved the way it was written and the way Ernest is speaking to the reader. Especially the way he spells out the formula that the book is following–it’s so cleverly done that the reader still doesn’t know who the killer is (at least in my case) despite the author spelling it out. I enjoyed the old-school feel of the mystery (the train!) as well.
Again I feel like there were a lot of characters to keep track of, which was complicated on audio. This time I didn’t have a physical copy to follow along with, so I stopped and restarted a few times before I could sit down and really focus on who was who.
I saw there’s a related Christmas novella as well, which I can’t wait to read!
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