Everyone this Christmas has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson (Review)

Everyone this Christmas has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson

Blurb

My name is Ernest Cunningham.

I’m not a detective. I just happen to have a knack for what makes mysteries – and murderers – tick. I’d hoped, this Christmas, that any killers out there might be willing to take a break for the holidays.

I was wrong.

So here I am, backstage at the Christmas show of world-famous magician Rylan Blaze, whose benefactor has just been murdered. From the magician’s assistant to the hypnotist, my suspects are all professional tricksters. Masters in the art of misdirection.

My clues are even more of a mystery:

A suspect covered in blood, with no memory of how it got there.

A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens.

And an advent calendar. Because, you know. It’s Christmas.

Solving the murder is the only gift I want this year.

But can I catch a killer, and make it home for Christmas alive?

Review

I will be honest I picked this book up not realising it was part of a series but to be honest it worked fine as a standalone book and I didn’t feel the story lacked anything because I hadn’t read the previous books. 

This book was a very easy read for me and I really enjoyed it being set in Australia. I think it was my first festive read set in a hot country. A real change from my usual wintery reads that I usually read this time of year. I also liked the main character Ernest Cunningham and I liked how he worked but I did find him a little bit big headed at times and this made him a little annoying. 

I really enjoyed the storyline of this book and how Cunningham worked out who the murderer was. His methods were very methodical and he reminded me a great deal of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. The way it was all done was very clever. 

The main problem I had with this book was that the characters were just rather unremarkable and very forgettable. Other than Ernest and maybe one other character I couldn’t tell you any of their names or anything really about them. I just felt like all the effort was put into the plot and not the characters which was a shame. 

I did enjoy this book but I wasn’t bowled over by it and to be honest I’m not sure I will return to the world of Ernest Cunningham but maybe I will one day. I give this book 3 out of 5 Dragons. 

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Purchase Links

Bookshop.org | Waterstones | WH Smith

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About the author

Benjamin Stevenson is an award-winning stand-up comedian and USA Today best-selling author. He is the author of the globally popular ‘Ernest Cunningham Mysteries’, including Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, which is currently being adapted into a major HBO TV series, and Everyone on This Train is a Suspect. His books have sold over 750,000 copies in twenty-nine territories and have been nominated for eight ‘Book of the Year’ awards.

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