By Dennis Fischman

I’m the kind of mystery reader who rarely solves the mysteries myself. Pieces of the puzzle come together for me but not the whole picture – plus, I get caught up in the characters (if they’re sympathetic) and the writing (if it’s any good).

But I immediately recognize the building blocks of mystery fiction, especially the classic cozy or what my mystery book club has taken to calling the “murder cabin”: things like a group of people, connected to one another, isolated from the rest of the world, each of them with secrets, some of them not really the person they pretend to be. And then they start dying.

“Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone”
by Benjamin Stevenson
Harper Large Print, 2022

If you’re an old fan like me, you will appreciate the new twists Benjamin Stevenson puts on this classic plot in Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. What’s more, you will like the protagonist, Ernie Cunningham. He’s a reader like us.

Ernie reads – and writes about – mysteries. In the front of the book, he includes the membership oath of the Detection Club, a 1930 organization that included such big names as Agatha Christie (who wrote about Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple), Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), and G.K. Chesterton (Father Brown).

Another member was Ronald Knox, author of “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” the classic rules about authors playing fair with their readers. And Ernie Cunningham promises to play fair with us and even go beyond the rules: right in the prologue, he tells all the pages on which “deaths in this book either happen or are reported to have happened.” And he is telling the truth, but the truth is slippery.

Here’s the setup for the story: Ernie’s family is gathering at a ski resort on the day his brother, Michael, is supposed to be released from prison. No spoiler here: you learn quickly that Michael killed a former cop who, years ago, shot their father, Robert, and that it was Ernie’s refusal to lie for Michael that got him convicted.

Now Michael is supposed to arrive – but shortly before he does, another, unidentified corpse shows up in the snow. Who is “Green Boots,” as they call the dead man? Who killed him, and why? And is his death by a particularly awful method connected to the other depredations of a serial killer the police have called “Black Tongue”?

That sounds straightforward, but in the course of the story, you find out that other people have died in the past in a way that involves the Cunningham family, and some of the family members are killed at the lodge. There’s intrigue with the police, a secretive business deal, and a wide range of testimony that makes you wonder what it means to tell the truth.

Author Benjamin Stevenson manages to play fair and play the readers for fools at the same time, and I marvel at his ability. This first book in a series is well written, fiendishly well plotted, funny at times, gripping at times, thoroughly informed about the mystery genre … and I didn’t believe a word of it. It required me not only to suspend disbelief but to hang, draw, and quarter disbelief. If you’re willing to go along for the ride, I think you will enjoy it too.