My sister read this book first and, really, I only backtracked into this because my parents gave me Everyone on This Train is a Suspect while we were on vacation and I got about eighty pages into it before I realized I really needed to read this one first. There was simply too much connective tissue to try to keep on trucking. My sister's review was: just at no point was I as into him as he was into himself, and I'm going to have to ditto that.

I could tell Ernest was going for funny, charming, relatable and just.... nothing ever landed. He's not as great as he thinks he is at any point in time, and this is with the benefit of me actually liking what I read of him in the second book. His humor is just not as on point in the first. Three stars for a good mystery, only three stars because the narrator kind of got in the way of it.