A review by jodar
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

There’s more to this novel than the Aussie blokish black humour it looks in danger of being at the start. There’s a strong element of metafiction: the narrator outlines the crime-novel rules he promises to follow, he explains at various points how he is adhering to the rules and he addresses the reader along the way with his conjectures in ‘narrative time’.

I felt the plot bogged down a bit about three quarters of the way through, but after that the tempo picked up again. A nice twist at the end that I didn’t spot, though I don’t read heaps of mystery fiction and I imagine that afficionados of the genre may well see it coming.
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