Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect by Benjamin StevensonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
“Thank God we’re (crime writers) just inventing it! If one of the six of us was to die right now, you’d have five suspects who all know how to get away with murder.”
The premise of Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson is exactly that - one of the authors at a writer's festival happening on a train is murdered and everyone else on the train is a suspect, including all the other writers who've done their research on how to get away with murder. Ernest Cunningham, one of the invitees for his book Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, tries to solve the mystery by banking on the individual expertises of all the writers, work on his next book, inject some romance into the proceedings, and also (less importantly) manages to defend his use of adverbs and learn to pronounce denouement.
If you think you don’t already know the rules to writing a murder mystery, trust me, you do. It’s all intuitive. I’m writing this in first person. First person equals survival. The rules are simple: nothing supernatural; no surprise identical twins; the killer must be introduced early on and be a major enough character to impact the plot. To prove the point, I’ll tell you that I use the killer’s name, in all its forms, exactly 106 times from here.
The plot and the character arcs fulfill the promise made by this premise and kept me hooked enough to finish the book. I particularly enjoyed Stevenson's style of writing as he emulates the Golden Age mysteries, but with his own breaking-the-fourth-wall flippant humor. Ernest's (Stevenson's) perspective in describing the setting and all the players involved initially was good, but his arc from a disinterested detective to an active player who stood to lose a lot as the stakes got higher was more satisfying!
I will point out that one inadvertent mimicry is the curious coincidence that both cases are solved by a piece of punctuation. Last year it was a full stop. This time, a comma saves the day.
I generally enjoy writers and actors breaking the fourth wall, if subtly done. There was quite a lot that worked in this book, like the little pronouncement about the comma at the beginning of the book. I will admit I kept a look out for suspicious commas and maybe even errant semi-colons.
I also see the point in making sure that the killer is a major character and has enough of an on-page presence. What I did not enjoy was keeping an active tally of the number of times each character was mentioned! Not to forget the number of writers on the train at any given time. The rules followed by the Golden Age mystery writers were to promote one purpose: To allow the reader the satisfaction of deducing the killer on their own, based on everything written that far. This constant counting of the number of times any given name appeared in the book did not promote any rational or logical thought towards figuring out the mystery and kept detracting from the reading experience.
However, we soon get to
The De-noo-moh, not Dee-now-ment (duh)
“I have to go through everyone’s motives and alibis publicly,” I said. “It’s basically a requirement of the genre.”
“Does it usually take this long?” All the crime writers in the room said simultaneously: “Yes.”
🌟🌟🌟
The rating for this book is 3 1/4 stars, rounded down to 3 stars as some of the clues given by the author while breaking the fourth wall annoyed me.
[3/4 star for the premise and the whole book; Half a star for the character arcs; One star for the plot/ story arc; Half a star for the world-building and description; Half a star for the writing - 3 1/4 stars in total.]
Quiz: How many adverbs do you spot in this review? 😉
