Poor Ernest Cunningham! Saddled with a dysfunctional family, each of whom have been responsible for somebody else’s death, the “how-to-write-a-mystery” author risks arrest and death at the reunion from hell in a snowbound Australian ski resort when the Cunningham clan is targeted by an insane serial killer!

Oh, but lucky Ernest! He survives, unmasks the Black Tongue, and writes a memoir about his adventures, a book that, for the first time, actually sells well. Oh, and he even sorts out his tattered love life and finds his Juliet! (Or Juliette, as it is spelled here.)

Poor Ernest . . . again! Now he’s pressured by his new agent to write a novel, even as he realizes he doesn’t know the first thing about writing one. How will he ever meet his deadline? And how will he face his agent when she meets up with Ernest and Juliette on board the famous Australian train known as the Ghan as invitees to a mystery writers’ conference? If only something would happen to inspire our hapless hero, and give him both a plot and the confidence to finally tie the knot with his beloved!

And then the first murder occurs on the train, and we’re back to Lucky Ernest . . . if he can survive!

Benjamin Stevenson’s debut mystery, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, was a funny, clever whodunnit awash with meta-fictional references to the Golden Age, with special attention paid to the Commandments of Father Ronald Knox, those rules that all the best classic authors both honored and ignored. In Stevenson’s second outing, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, Knox’s rules are again referenced, with maybe a few of Van Dine’s thrown in. Our erstwhile narrator-hero figures he will need every one of them to help him solve the murders, although his frazzled girlfriend reminds him that 1) he’s not a real sleuth, and 2) real-life murderers seldom follow the rules of Golden Age detective fiction. But even Juliette acknowledges that both of them are in a book – or soon will be, if this new plot is juicy enough to make it publishable.

As before, Ernest plays the double role of main character and an author seeking to play a game with his audience. And once again, Stevenson mines the set-up for plenty of humor, from the sharply-etched portraits of the various writer types – the alcoholic veteran, the one-hit wonder, the pompous writer of “fine lit” who has deigned to venture into genre fiction – to the antics and jealousies of rivals, agents, publishers and fans. The running joke is that nobody is better equipped to either commit a murder or solve one than a mystery author. Here the big reward is that the one who solves the case gets to write the best book about it, which gives us some wonderful moments like this face-off between Ernest and a a smarmy fellow author:

“‘Hang on. What do you think is going on here?’

“‘You’ve just confessed,’ Royce said.

“‘Confessed?’

“Well, I’m interviewing you.’

“I’m interviewing you,’ I huffed.

“‘Why do you get to interview me, and I don’t get to interview you?’

“‘Because I’m the narrator!’

“‘Not in my book.’”

Of course, another quite famous murder mystery set on board a grand train is referenced, but I must tell you that this is not my experience with a murder mystery on an Australian train. Those of you fortunate enough to have read the Adventures on Trains series may remember that the fifth book, Sabotage on the Solar Express, was set on a fictional train inspired by many of the railway lines that criss-cross the Australian continent, including the Ghan. Both books share a sense of adventure that, fairly or not, I think many of us associate with the world Down Under, and both give us exciting and dangerous climaxes.

That famous murder on the Orient Express may be the most cerebral of the three, but Stevenson has a lot of fun playing around with clues and codes and dangling them before our eyes – right down to announcing a chapter where we’ll find a telling clue or giving us a running count on how many times suspects’ names have been mentioned (because, evidently, this matters to crime novelists.) I’m not sure that the author or his detective plays entirely fair here, and things get awfully complicated for a minute there . . . but this is still another lively and enjoyable outing, well worthy of your time.

Spoilers here: Ernest does survive (well, he does narrate the book!), just in time for another mystery to present itself to him — and it will, in October, when Ernest faces down a book full of magicians in Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret! More spoilers: I’ve already ordered my copy!