#Benjamin Stevenson

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP BPC || January 5 || So Friggen' Funny: Ernest Cunningham Series by Benjamin Stevenson

[readingoals]

Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret is an impeccable holiday special in this fun meta mystery series.

I read it as the author intended - as an advent calendar. One chapter a day from December 1 through 26 (love that boxing day rep). And I had a fucking blast! The chapters always ended on a cliff hanger and it was a really fun way to experience the mystery.

Also oh my god do you know how refreshing it is to read a Christmas story set in Australia! The descriptions of the heat and of Australian traditions. It just made me so bloody happy.

[noahsbookhoard]

📚November 2024 Book Review📚

November was a bit less busy that October and varies from jawdropping to very meh.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone (Ernest Cunningham #1) by Benjamin Stevenson

That one is definitely in the jawdropping category. A great murder mystery in which you have all the keys and the author is right there telling you to "go ahead and solve it". I didn't. I had fun anyway. Just as darkly funny as the title announces.

Wintersmith (Discworld #34) by Terry Pratchett

I think sofar it is my favorite Tifanny Aching story: she is growing up and that shows, she is more responsible, she owns up to what she does wrong, she is still whip smart and I never get tired of the Nac Mac Feegle.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

This count as a novel read since I completed Dracula Daily like everyone on nov 8. The audio drama version by Bloody FM production is so good and a great plus because some of Van Helsing lecture at John are really just too long.

Une belle vie by Virginie Grimaldi

I don't know why but I ended up reading 3 Grimaldi in as many months, maybe because they are rather easy to read, funny and generally have a hopeful vives even when dealing with heavy themes. This one is the story of two estranged sister who reconnect by coming for one last vacation in their grand mother house before they sell it. They rebuilt their relationship and draw back childhood memories, some good and some bad. The part where I got confused is that the author tries to tackle a lot of subjects (bipolarity, depression, domestic violence and cancer are the ones I remember but there are many) instead of just one are two. It was a lot to handle at times but a good read nonetheless.

The Restaurang at the End of the Universe (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy #2) by Douglas Adams

Book 2 is just as crazy as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I found it a little more coherent, as in I knew approximately where we were going (a restaurant) and the convoluted adventure that leads to and from it made more sense to me than in book 1. I'm really excited for the rest of the series.

L'amant by Marguerite Duras

I admit, I don't see the appeal. The writing is good but not incredibly so. The story itself is rambling, I guess it was intentional but it makes it harder to follow. The relationship between the author as a girl and her lover at least 10 years older is very disturbing when judge by modern standards and I was a little put off by the casual way she talks about her brother's death. I must have missed the literary qualities here but I might try another of her novel later on.

La Dame du manoir de Wildfell Hall (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) by Anne Brontë

I felt so much fucking rage reading this novel! It has some of the most heinous male characters I have ever read and even the main love interest has a hell of a journey to stop being an entitled jealous violent piece of shit. That said it is very well written otherwise I would have either given up or thrown the whole thing through the window. Helen, the main character is strong minded and brave, I loved her from the start and grew even warmer. I strongly recommend it.

Tw for domestic abuse and alcoholism.

The Sword Catcher (Chronicles of Castelane #1) by Cassandra Clare

This was an indulgence: I said I wanted to read less traditional medieval heroic fantasy and it falls right into it. It is good tho! I liked the concept of the Sword Catcher and the Ragpicker King amd especially how the two characters interact. I really hope the relationship between Connor and Kel is explored more too in the future books because the homoerotic subtext deserve to be more text than that!

Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean #2) T J Klune

I loved The House in the Cerulean Sea so I was excited for the sequel, but a little weary too. I was afraid not to find what made book 1 so dear to me. But there it was! The kids and their shenanigans, Arthur and Linus being their lovey dovey selves, Zoey and Helen are all the village had kept its newly opened mind from the end of book 1 and that was very comforting. The story is hard, the hate and fear they face hits a little too close. But they overcome it and everything ends well which is just what I wanted to read.

The kids calling Arthur and Linus Dad and Papa was extremely cute. I really loved David and how he bonded with Lucy. Not a comfort book as much as the first one but I had a great time reading it

My Roommate is a Vampire by Jenna Levine

I stumbled upon this one because I watched this video of a person who read all the Rylo fanfic turned novels out of morbid curiosity and this one seemed intriguing enough for me to try, open mind and all that. I was promised some whimsy, a shopping montage and a heist.

Well there's comedy (an kumquats for some reason) The shopping montage wasn't much of a montage, they just went and tried t-shirts on. But the end was just stupid: female lead went ahead with a plan she deems stupid and unlikely to work, us reader with even the tiniest bit of social media experience know that the plan is stupid and can't possibly work. And it works. Just genuinely first degree work. When you go with that in a comedy setting at least make your stupid plan work in a funny way, WWDITS style! Some bits are tedious, I understand your 400 year old don't know how to use Instagram but I do and I don't need a full chapter of tutorial (same chapter as my newest fight with my nemesis, the possessiveness trope, you don't get to storm off and brood just cause she posted bikini pics dude!)

Overall it was quite fun if you don't think to much about it.

When Among Crows by Veronica Roth

I listen to the audio book and the accents were *chef kiss*: it is a novella with slavic folklore creatures in an modern setting and I wasn't expecting to love it so much!! It's a story about monsters and family and duty. Angsty, a bit gay, the characters relationship work very well. It will be a reread in the future.Greatest of news for me today! I discovered by googling the spelling of characters names that a second book is coming this year!

[razreads]

Owe, owe, owe. You use that word so much. A family is not a credit card.

Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #65 – Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Due to a mixture of getting hit with one plague after another and also a new Dragon Age game, I basically did not open a book for the first two weeks of November. I can’t recall why this first ended up on my TBR, but an easy read mystery seemed like a good way to get back into the habit. Which it was! A very chatty, very self-aware reading that spent most of its page count just barely on the right side of fun instead of grating, but an excellent potato chip of a book. Not sure whether it would be more enjoyable or entirely insufferable to someone with a more-than-surface-level grounding in the genre.

The genre here being mysteries, of the ‘family reunion in a ski lodge, where everyone has some kind of secret and the bodies start dropping just as a blizzard picks up’ variety. The title gives away the majority (though not all) of those secrets – the protagonist (Ernie) is seeing most of his family for the first time in three years after he testified against his brother in court on a murder charge, as said brother gets out on early release and the family all gathers to welcome him back – including Ernie’s ex-wife, who left him for said brother while he was in prison. Then a body is found lying in the snow, having being killed via suffocating in ash and lelt there overnight, and the only police officer able to make it to th ehill before the storm starts gets nosy. Ernie’s brother definitely-not-legally appoints him as his lawyer, and he ends up desperately trying to figure out what’s happening as secrets come out and more people start dying.

The central gimmick of the story is that it’s diegetically a mystery novel – Ernie makes his living selling ‘how-to’ guides on the genre to aspiring authors on Amazon, and after surviving the events of the books gets a nice fat advance to write a tell-all true crime book about it. A conceit which doesn’t really hold up when you apply too much thought, but does justify the extremely self- and genre-aware narration running through the book. This is the sort of story which gives you the page numbers of every death in the first chapter, and has extended digressions when a cliche of the genre is or is not being lived up to. This, being honest, stops it from ever actually feeling really tense or compelling, but then I don’t get the sense it’s really ever supposed to be. Very Whedon-esque, in both the good and bad ways. The narrator has a lot of quips for the reader.

It also left the book so concerned with being a commentary on the Mystery Novel that it never really became much of a intriguing mystery either – the artifice was just too obvious, ,at least for me. Not that I still didn’t quite enjoy the drawing-room reveal scene, but then I’m just a huge sucker for those in general. In general though, eh, not really my genre I suppose?

A large part of which is the villain being such a – well, demon, basically? There’s a severe mismatch in tone and mood when everyone else feels like sit com characters and then someone goes around horribly torturing people to death as a stress response. Again, not really my genre, but ‘serial killer whose just fundamentally broken by their childhood and a menace to the world’ isn’t an archtype I find particularly interesting in anything, let alone works otherwise going for something like psychological realism.

Not to say it was a bad book overall. Fun light read – just not anything more than that.

[smileandneversurrender]

La tua famiglia non è chi ha il tuo stesso sangue, sono le persone per cui sei disposto a versarlo.

Tutti nella mia famiglia hanno ucciso qualcuno - Benjamin Stevenson

[timotey]

An Aussie cozy mystery, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, book 1 in the Ernest Cunningham series by Benjamin Stevenson, and I can highly recommend it. If you like breaking the 4th fall - Ern really likes talking to his readers and explaining things - and some very dark humor, that is. I mean, as a friend of mine would say, there's nowhere to spit for all the dead bodies.

My first Aussie cozy and my first book by this author, but definitely not the last. Already reading the second one in the series, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect.

[wideeyedreader]

Recently Read: Everyone on This Train is a Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

4.75 stars! Not as gripping at first as the previous book, but still so good.

[desdasiwrites]

– Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

[deadiez]

books I read in may 2024

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP BPC || August 9 || Favorite Title: Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

[llamasaysrandomstuff]

read everyone in my family has killed someone by benjamin stevenson.

absolutely adored the writing style. it gave deadpool meets an incompetent hercule poirot.

i would recommend it if you want a cozy lighthearted witty winter murder mystery.

[therainbowaftertherainstorm]

playing detective

[peppermintplushy]

Happy World Book Day!!!!!! 📔📚

[literary-illuminati]

The chatty easy read mystery might be a bit much for me, but still- good line

[readingoals]

Going into this I was a little worried I wouldn't like it, that it'd feel too much like trying to copy or cash in on the success of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. But it didn't! It kept the tone and voice of the first book but was a separate story with new characters so I never felt like it was an unnecessary sequel. It will be interesting to see if he writes more though. I think he could get away with a few more but the way these mysteries are presented I think makes them hard to keep doing indefinitely.

Anyway, The characters were fun, the mystery was interesting, and I really love Ernest as a narrator. Also, another Aussie author, we love to see it! I had a blast with this one and ended up giving it 5 stars.