This is a cracking good read and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t become a massive bestseller.
It had me at the title: ‘Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone’ must go down in history as one of the best novel titles ever. It sets the tone for what follow. The direct style, where the author continually breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly, is brilliantly done and sucks you in.
The novel is rather dark, atmospheric, exciting… a variation on the locked room mystery with plenty of suspects and exciting plot twists. It’s very, very funny too.
The 10 members of the Cunningham family are brought together in a mountain resort, then stranded there due to a storm. There’s a murder. Everyone in the family is a suspect. And we are told from the start that all 10 of them are killers. But which one of them is guilty in this case?
It’s fabulously clever. The narrator is someone who writes a blog about classic crime fiction and is an expert in the tropes and rules of such fiction, notably Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of 1929. In this novel, he continually refers to those rules of the genre and tells us whether he is respecting them or not… Oh hell, it’s better explained in the book.
If you like classic mysteries, especially the great British crime classics, you will absolutely adore this book. It’s both an education on the classic crime novel form and a great read as well. Highly recommended.
My thanks to Netgalley, publisher Penguin Random House and the auther for giving me a free copy of this book. All my reviews are 100% honest and unbiased, regardless of how I acquire the book.
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