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Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone review – irksomely quirky whodunnit
This much-hyped crime novel has been marketed as Knives Out meets The Thursday Murder Club – but it is excruciatingly self-referential
Benjamin Stevenson has a cinephile buddy who seeks out spoilers. Once an ending is good and ruined, he can focus on the film. Stevenson’s new novel was inspired by this back-to-front tactic. “I thought: ‘what if I spoiled the entire book on the first page,” the author explained in a recent interview, “can I build a crime novel out of it?’”. The result is Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, an exorbitantly hyped whodunnit, where the grand riddle is the body count. “Everyone in my family has killed someone,” it opens. “Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once.”
The dastardly clan in question is the Cunningham family – a grand collision of tropes. There’s an uptight aunt; a quiet addict; a Rolex-wielding lawyer; an imperious matriarch. Our narrator is the affably gormless one, Ernest (the name is no accident). The family is ferociously loyal – united in notoriety – so when Ernest provides the testimony that convicts his brother Michael of murder, he’s ostracised. Even Ernest’s wife leaves him for his homicidal brother. On the eve of Michael’s release from prison, Ernest is summoned to a reunion in the Snowy Mountains. It’s a chance to bury the hatchet, but knowing his family’s lethal inclinations, the hatchet might be real.
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