Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

Ernest "Ern" Cunningham writes how-to guides for mystery novelists, so he knows the rules of the genre — and he swears he's going to play fair with you. Which is awkward, because as he cheerfully admits up front, everyone in his family has killed someone, himself included. When the fractious Cunningham clan gathers at an isolated, snowbound guesthouse in the Australian Alps to mark the release of Ern's brother Michael from prison, a frozen body turns up on the slopes — and it may be the work of a serial killer known as the Black Tongue.

Trapped by the snow with a family full of people who have each, one way or another, ended a life, Ern narrates the unravelling with dry wit and an insistence on honesty, footnoting his own clues and even listing the pages on which the murders occur.

A clever, funny homage to golden-age detective fiction — written to Ronald Knox's classic "commandments" of the whodunit — Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone launched Benjamin Stevenson's bestselling Ernest Cunningham series and became a word-of-mouth crime hit.