By Benjamin Stevenson

I was very amused that Kinsey had recommended this in her review of Hench, since I was reading it at that very moment! I enjoyed it enough that I should check out Hench and the others she listed as well. And, I don’t think I really should have enjoyed this book! It is chock full of literary elements that I normally find frustrating or off-putting, like heavy foreshadowing or winky meta narration. I often find that meta concepts in books take away from the emotional impact, that as a reader one is then too focused on the conceit of the writing structure to get really immersed in the narrative. Benjamin Stevenson manages to capture both, though.

There’s a couple layers of conceits, too. The title is the most obvious: everyone in the narrator’s family has killed someone, or at least will have by the end of the book. When a body is found at the remote retreat hosting the family reunion, suspects are everywhere. Ernest, the narrator, is also an author of, not mysteries, but guides on how to write mysteries. As more bodies appear, he investigates his family, slowly uncovering a slew of past mysteries and secrets.

As narrator he’s a strict adherent of the rules established by the authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and extremely dismissive of the modern trend of unreliable narrators. Though he repeatedly swears to be upfront and truthful about everything, he still manages to insinuate one thing before the story twists to something else. It is very clever, and I actually enjoyed more and more each time it happened.

There are also moments of surprisingly philosophical introspection, on all the different ways people can die and other people can take the blame or be blamed for those deaths. The ultimate end is quite a spectacle (that I imagine will translate well to television, if the proposed adaption goes through), and bends the classic rules in a letter-of-the-law-not-the-spirit kind of way.