finished reading

I finally circled back to this series! I realized I read the first one back in April of ’24, so honestly, I was due for another round. Once again, the author is leaning hard into that classic Golden Age of Detective Fiction vibe: think a total locked-room mystery, very Agatha Christie, but with a modern wink. What really gets me, though, is the narrator, Ernest Cunningham. He’s constantly breaking the fourth wall and "chatting" with the reader, which is just so cheeky and clever. I love the self-deprecating wit, and especially how he keeps poking at the "rules" of detective fiction. It’s like he’s inviting us to solve it right alongside him--or at least laugh while he tries to.  The audio is great!

My only complaint is that the cast of characters was difficult to keep straight.  

From the publisher:

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty:

the debut writer (me!)

the forensic science writer

the blockbuster writer

the legal thriller writer

the literary writer

the psychological suspense writer

But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime.

Of course, we should also know how to commit one.

How can you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?