Re-Reading Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

 

I'm going to my book group in the morning for the first time since November of 2023.  The book being read is Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stephenson.

I'm pretty sure I read the book the year it came out, which was 2022.  I enjoyed it and have bought and read every other book in the series since then. 

I thought I remembered enough so I could just skim through in preparation.  Somehow, in the intervening years, it seems that I didn't recall as much as I thought.  The plot was far more labyrinthine than I recalled.  The characters were more engaging.  

I read through all the way, then, and noted these things in particular:

There is a great deal of the author talking directly to the reader.  

There are many mentions from the author that he's sticking to the rules of a Fair Play Mystery outlined in the prologue.

Also in the prologue, the pages with deaths are delineated for the reader so you can keep a body count.  Trickily, there may be a death on those pages, but you don't always know who the killer is on those pages.

I may be counting poorly, but I believe, because I was making a list, that one single person is supposed to have been killed by three different people at different times.

There's a remarkable amount of foreshadowing.  It isn't all the "had I but known" type of foreshadowing, but there's more than you typically see in a modern novel. 

Despite being a group of killers, the Cunningham family are surprisingly touching as individuals. 

 

 Even more highly recommended than after my first reading of the book.