Reviews - Tutti su questo treno sono sospetti

6.63k reviews for:

Tutti su questo treno sono sospetti

Benjamin Stevenson

3.94 AVERAGE

annairene's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous emotional funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

herielma's review against another edition

2.5

adventurous dark fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A

schwikat's review against another edition

3.0

I am very conflicted with how I felt about this book. I liked it in the beginning, then it lost me because I felt like nothing was really happening and then I got back into it once the second murder happened and then it lost me at the very end again. I should preface this review with saying I did not read the first book in the Ernest Cunningham series.

I don't love the premise behind the book. The fact that Ernest is writing a book about all this happening feels a little too weird. Like throughout the book he talks about his rules for mystery/thriller novels. His real life follows those perfectly which does not actually happen in real life. I think those rules could have worked had we not been made aware of them. But on the other hand those rules he made and kept reminding us of helped us to feel like we were narrowing down who the killer could have been. With that being said, I think about how much more interesting the story would have been if we were just following Ernest on this train and going through the motions with him instead of trying to analyze every detail. I found myself taking notes throughout but I ended up taking the wrong notes because I didn't have all the information he had. Which one of his rules was that the reader needed to have all the information the narrator had (which was not entirely true in this book).

The characters were pretty boring and fit their models too well in my opinion. They were interesting, kind of. The girlfriend played her part too well with being upset about him not spending time with her, the agent was busy trying to get new authors to sign under her, the murderer was crazy and manipulative. It just felt too cookie-cutter for me.

I do think the pacing was an issue for me as well at some points of the book. In the beginning I was learning about everyone so it was fine. But then it was 100+ pages of just conversations that didn't mean anything to me since I didn't know about any of the character's relationships so it was really boring. It took me forever to get through. Even the first death wasn't super interesting. But once the second death happened things got a little more exciting. There was more tension and drama and action. I started to see the relationships between the characters which was great! But then once everything was revealed and Ernest was explaining everything I began to forget everything I had learned in the first half of the book because it didn't feel important when I was reading it.

Overall it was a decent book. I will probably forget I read it in a week because I didn't really care about any of the characters that much. But it was an ok read.