Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect - Ernest Cunningham #2

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect  is the second outing for Ernest Cunningham by Benjamin Stevenson. Released 30th Jan 2024 by HarperCollins on their Mariner imprint, it's 336 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. Paperback format due out 1st quarter 2025 from the same publisher. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links.

This is such a clever and well rendered series absolutely full of quirky humor and giggle-out-loud prose. A closed circle of suspects, this time book people on a train: publishers, writers, and readers. There have been comparisons to Clue and Knives Out, and those are both apt and inevitable. It's not at all derivative, but it does have the same vibes of whimsy and camp that are also present in the aforementioned. 

It's somewhat the same format (and style) as the first book, so readers who enjoyed that one will likely find this installment to their taste as well. 

It's a much more limited range of characters than last time, and although the book's first person narrative takes some effort, readers are well repaid in the form of fast, sharply funny, and perceptive commentary from the narrator. Ernie continually breaks the fourth wall, which some readers will find annoying and repetitive, and which seemed personally to be just on the right side of comedic. Read back to back, it would almost certainly be a bit too much of snarky overload. 

Three and a half stars. Well written, clever, at certain points surprisingly funny, and entertaining. For fans who don't mind -heaping- helpings of whimsy and sharp humor in their murder mysteries. The author's a stand up comedian in real life, and it shows.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.