I was very kindly given an e-ARC of this book via Netgalley and Michael Joseph / Penguin Random House.

It's not often I like the second book in a series more than the first, but I'm quite glad to say Ernest Cunningham proved me wrong. It's 'Murder on the Orient Express' except we're in Australia, it's a train full of writers and there's no Belgian with a twirly mustache to solve things quietly.

Whilst I enjoyed the first book in this series, I had some issues with it - and those kind of cropped up again in this one. I think, as the author so deftly puts it in the last few chapters, that's just his style as a writer. The middle was a bit overwritten and dragged for longer than necessary, but I certainly did not see the ending coming and the book brilliantly threw plenty of red herrings in my direction. The best murder mysteries are generally the ones where you've got no idea what's going on, but you're having fun anyway.

I took off a star because of a personal gripe that I felt spoiled the novel a bit. I'll be vague in an attempt to avoid spoilers, but one of the core motivations / backgrounds for one of the female characters is that she was raped by one of the victims. And it made me feel incredibly icky. Generally, the female characters in these books are so-so, but I felt putting such a cliched plot point one of the characters to that, when there were so many other options the author could have chosen to give her motive was a bit of a cop-out. Lads, we can get through books without women being victims to powerful men. There are other plots. But, that's just a me thing.

I've gotten a bit of a bug for murder mysteries right now and truly, there's no one writing quite like Benjamin Stevenson and, to an extent, Ernest Cunningham too.

'Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect' will be available from 29th February.