Six writers. Five detectives. Four days. Three weapons. Two murders. One train.

Ernest Cunningham is struggling with his second book. His first book, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, was relatively easy to write, given that he lived through the events/traumas involved, but it seems that writing fiction is somewhat harder. He is hopeful that an invite to a book festival aboard the Ghan, the famous(ish) train that travels from Darwin to Adelaide across the outback, and that indeed proves to be the case. But only because he gets to write about the real murder that is about to happen…

When one of the writers ends up dead, Ernest decides to investigate – as do some of the other authors. After all, they all write crime fiction, they know exactly what goes through the mind of a murderer. Except, of course, there’s every chance that one of them knows exactly what happened… because one of them might have written the perfect murder…

I was probably the one person in the world who was a bit on the fence about Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. The book felt like The Nine Wrong Answers in overdrive, with constant challenges to the reader, and I felt that despite it being a very clever mystery, the tone never quite clicked with me.

Going into this one knowing what to expect made this one much more palatable. The game playing is cranked up to eleven – for example, Cunningham discloses early on how often the murderer’s name appears in the book and every now and then gives an update so that the readers who are more inclined to guess (or possibly gamble) can place their bets.

Cunningham’s voice worked much better for me this time round. He makes some bad decisions – in particular one in the middle and one right at the end – but he’s a much more likeable character here, and I thought the revelation with his girlfriend was very well done.

Plot-wise, well, this never stops moving, with constant little misdirections and reveals as the book progresses. The murder plot twists and turns all over the place, with some surprising reveals concerning what is going on and how everyone is linked together. The plotting is really impressive – nicely complex but still completely understandable.

While everything is clued to an extent, I did think that towards the end, Ernest becomes a little too much of a super-sleuth, deducing almost everything correctly almost at the drop of a hat. He’s just a little too accurate about the details and this was just a little bit jarring that he goes from not knowing much to suddenly having almost the complete picture.

All in all, though, this was a really entertaining read and a great homage to the classic era of mystery fiction. The more I think about it, the cleverer that I think it is. Well worth your time.

Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect is out now in the UK from Michael Joseph in hardback and ebook. Many thanks for the review e-copy via NetGalley – sorry it’s a couple of days late.