Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

This is really a 3.75 for me. I like the narrator voice. The characters are interesting. I don't have any real issues with the book beyond it being a bit rambling at times (which the book seems to acknowledge with an email excerpt). It's a very meta take on genre, and I like it. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a good mystery. It's just didn't quite 'wow' me enough for a four or a five.

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clovetra's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

damn. this is probably the best adult mystery novel i’ve read.

i mean already bonus points for being australian. like idk the tone of this book just makes sense to be australian. it’s so goofy and wacky yet insane. once i realised the setting i went “ahhh yes everything already makes sense”.

also props to the writing of ernest. not only is he so incredibly funny, but he’s intelligent and intriguing. he has a personality beyond the detective role in this novel, and his fourth wall breaks were just epic. i mean cmon him telling us after someone’s vomiting “she’s not pregnant u idiots i know it’s a cliche but she’s not pregnant i can assure you”. and this book is just that for like 370 pages which was AMAZING. i always love me some well-timed meta-commentaries and this book is filled to the brim with it. i’m so serious at times i was doubting this was a work of fiction and not just an autobiography with some names changed.

the other characters in this cast felt a little flat to me, but i think that’s just because there’s so many people. almost everyone except ernest is reduced to one or two facts about them until the very end where there is exposition diarrhoea about every single character.

except andy bro was just along for the ride. he started the story with a beer, and ended it with hitting someone with a fire poker. thank you for your service andy

and that brings me to why this book isn’t 5-stars — the actual mystery. now i will always give a book credit where credit is due, in that i didn’t guess the killer. yay!!!! but honestly i don’t think i could if i tried. so much was going on even at my hardest i could not follow what was going on. and when this character is hiding x and this character is hiding y and this character is hiding z i was just flatlining. there’s a fine line between keeping your audience on their toes and letting your mc figure out the mystery just before they do, and having ur reader so fucking lost that they have no hope of figuring it out until the great reveal where all is explained. like yes okkkkk i do understand how this all went down at the end…. but holy shit there were so many fucking moving pieces and conclusions leapt to by one liners i really had no hope. and that is where this book lets me down. it’s trying to be so clever and it does achieve that, but at the risk of the reader having to just roll with the punches because almost every chapter there is a plot twist and at some point you just cannot keep up with them anymore.

i will say though that i will defo be continuing this series, as although i just bitched and moaned about how this book was too intelligent, i still had a great time.

i will say though that as much as this book tries to sell to the readers that it is not your average mystery novel…… by the end it lowkey does turn out to be 🤐

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