I’m not a huge mystery reader – I’ve read a bunch of the classics, but murder mysteries don’t often wind up in the pile. I’m not sure what prompted me to pick this one up, but I’m glad I did.
Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone a bit of a close-up magic show: Benjamin Stevenson outlines at the outset of the book the rules that he’s following in writing the book – the 10 commandments of detective fiction by Ronald Knox in 1928 (disregarding the racist one) are adhered to carefully, and Stevenson actually lists each page that a murder happens on, before the story gets going.
It’s a good bit. Everyone in My Family has Killed Someone starts with momentum. In a cold open, we get a quick glimpse of the protagonist, a writer named Ernest Cunningham, acting as an accomplice to a murder 3 years ago. Then, skip to present day and our hero is headed to a family reunion at a ski resort in Australia. A storm hits, a body is found, and the family is snowed in, while a killer stalks the resort.
It’s a classic setup, and Stevenson establishes stakes and relationships early. He also consistently breaks the fourth wall to mug for the reader a bit but also build trust as a reliable narrator, making sure we understand that he’s following his own rules. The sections of the book are named after the family member who kills someone in that section — even if it’s a little unclear who or how at the time.
The story is engaging, if a little overstuffed – there are a lot of characters in this novel and it could have used a cheat sheet, but I eventually got the hang of it.
The first half or two-thirds of this book had me breathless, finding any opportunity to sneak in a couple short chapters. The whole book is made memorable by a scene right about the midpoint that’s so poignant and unexpectedly emotional that I said ‘holy shit’ aloud to an empty room in the middle of the night. For that scene alone, this book will stay with me, and I recommend it widely based only on that scene.
Right at that point the story started to lose steam for me. The author’s bit started to wear thin in the second half of the book, and by the last 100 pages I was struggling to stay invested. There’s no subtlety to this book once the mystery starts to unravel, the narrator’s constant self-reference and exposition wears thin. The book could have been 100 pages shorter if there was a little less mugging going on.
Once it’s all solved, it felt somehow unnecessarily complicated and also much too tidy – every detail amounts to something, and the protagonist gets a little too cute with the ‘I told you so’ moments in the back half.
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is an entertaining read – there’s a series in the works at HBO, maybe. It often reminded me of the Glass Onion or Clue films. I can’t rank it as a murder mystery, as I’ve probably only read a dozen or so in life, but for the first half and the heartstopping surprise at the halfway point, it’s absolutely worth picking up.
