An Evening with Benjamin Stevenson

Join Benjamin Stevenson as he discusses his new sharp and witty detective novel.

With all the ingenuity of an Agatha Christie novel and the style and charm of Knives Out, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is a fiendishly clever take on the classic locked room murder mystery.

Crime fiction aficionado, Ernie Cunningham, is a reluctant guest at a family reunion held in a snowbound mountain retreat. For three years, Ernie has been shunned by his family after he witnessed his brother Michael kill a man and immediately shopped him to the police.

As the Cunninghams gather for this fraught family get-together on the eve of Michael’s release, the body of a man is found dead on the slopes. The man appears to have burned to death, and yet his body is in the middle of a pristine, unmelted snowfield.

When the death is revealed to have the same MO as The Black Tongue serial killer and when everyone in is his family is a suspect, Ernie must discover who committed the grisly crime before everyone ends up dead…

Award-winning comedian and author Benjamin Stevenson is truly a master of the high-concept mystery. The book opens with a list of 10 rules that were agreed upon and adhered to by a secret society of writers, known as the Detection Club, and which included among its members Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, Ronald Knox and Dorothy L Sayers. The story plays out in accordance to these ‘10 Commandments’ and Stevenson constantly refers back to the mechanics of crime fiction, and messes with these rules. In doing so he weaves a tight narrative that unravels in a series of twists and unexpected revelations that expose each and every member of the notorious Cunningham family to be, you guessed it, a killer.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is a sharp, witty and edgy murder mystery unlike any detective novel we’ve seen before in Australian fiction.

7pm arrivals for 7:05pm start.