Family Matters | Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone

This week we focus on family drama with a Benjamin Stevenson mystery!

So Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is what happens when you take a classic Agatha Christie setup — isolated ski lodge, blizzard, mysterious corpse — and then hand the mic to the most aggressively self-aware millennial. Enter Ernest Cunningham.

Ernest is the kind of narrator who would pause mid-murder to tell you he’s legally required to disclose that he once plagiarized a Wikipedia paragraph. He’s painfully honest, painfully awkward, and surrounded by a family so dysfunctional they make the Roys from Succession look like they do trust falls at Thanksgiving.

I think that’s part of what I like about it. His asides feel like ADHD.

Anyway — Ernest is summoned to a family reunion at a snowed-in resort because his brother is about to be released from prison, and nothing says “Welcome home!” like forcing the entire family who testified against you into a chalet with no exits. Tensions are already high — because again… everyone in the family has, at some point, killed someone — when a body shows up in the snow like Mother Nature’s passive-aggressive Christmas card.

What makes the book fun is Ernest doesn’t tell the story like a mystery; he tells it like a millennial explaining a toxic friend group on TikTok Live.

He’s constantly interrupting:

• “Here’s a clue you should remember.”

• “Here’s me failing basic social interaction.”

• “Here’s a footnote nobody wanted but I’m giving you anyway.”

His family, meanwhile, is a buffet of chaos personalities. It’s like the Avengers but everyone’s superpower is bad decisions. His dad is scary, his mom is dramatic, his brother is fresh out of prison, his step-family looks like they fight in group chats for sport… and they’re all just casually like, ‘Oh yeah I killed someone once, anyway pass the mashed potatoes.’

Every single one of them is hiding something — not like “I stole your scarf,” but like “I accidentally committed a felony and blocked out the details.” Ernest is trying to play detective while simultaneously managing his social anxiety, keeping track of everyone’s alibis, dodging old grudges, and explaining mystery structure to you like he’s giving a TED Talk titled:“So Your Family Is a Menace to Society: A Beginner’s Guide.”

And the best part? The book actually plays fair. Ernest literally tells you when he’s presenting a clue, when he’s bullshitting, and when a fact might become relevant later — like he’s your deeply stressed personal assistant during a homicide retreat.

By the end you’ve got a locked-room mystery, a family therapy session with a body count, and a narrator who feels like he should be sponsored by Lexapro. It’s twisty, meta, and hilarious in that “laugh-but-also-check-your-family-tree” way.

Also recommended:

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker follows the Gavin family of Colorado Springs. They have 12 kids 10 boys and 2 girls. 6 brothers diagnosed with schizophrenia. Follows the family in early signs they didn’t realize meant something as well as discusses the various interventions: inpatient, institutions, medications, trauma, and the stigma of mental health, mental illness, and living with diagnosis.

Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford is a memoir of Christina’s And her brothers life growing up with movie star Joan Crawford. Who, clearly, has some at the time undiagnosed mental illness compounded with the Hollywood work hard/play hard and depending on pill cocktails to do it all. Lots of people know the famous line from the movie adaptions “No wire hangers.”

For Further Research

We shamelessly recommended a non-fiction written by one of the hosts of Bibliophage.

Momma Cusses by Gwenna Laithland really is a solid way to begin looking at your family, how you communicate, how to navigate feelings, and how to try not to be the reason your kids need therapy.

Book Hangover RX

A prescription of a book that will pull you out of the hangover Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone might leave you with.

The Appeal by Janice Hallet

Okay, picture yourself in the most aggressively polite British village imaginable — Lower Lockwood — where everyone bakes, gossips, and does amateur theatre like their lives depend on it. Into this chaos saunter Sam and Kel Greenwood, fresh from Doing Good Abroad™, and instantly everyone in town treats them like IKEA furniture: useful, but suspicious.

The local royalty is the Hayward family — Martin (the director who’s always directing), Helen (main-character energy), and their granddaughter Poppy, who’s suddenly diagnosed with a rare cancer. Overnight, the whole village launches a mega fundraising campaign: raffles, half-marathons, probably someone selling artisanal chutney for $12 a jar. It’s all very wholesome — until it absolutely is not.

Because someone dies.

And instead of giving you a narrator, the book just throws a giant stack of emails, texts, flyers, memos, and passive-aggressive theatre group messages at your face. Two junior lawyers are told: “Here, sort this out,” and now you are the third junior lawyer who’s had one too many wines and is circling names like, “THIS BITCH IS LYING.”

Everyone in this village has secrets. The theatre group is basically a cult with costumes. The fundraising plot starts smelling weird. Sam and Kel are either heroes or the world’s worst vibes. And every email has someone CC’ing the one person who should absolutely not be CC’d.

As the murder, the fundraising, and the community drama tangle together, the real mystery becomes less “whodunnit” and more “why are these people allowed to interact unsupervised?” The final twist hits like someone slammed shut a binder full of lies.

Young Reader Recs

Read to me:

Santa Loves Sand by Ebbie Bonardi

Santa and Mrs Claus spend their vacations at all the beaches from Florida, California, Rhode Island, and North Carolina.

Read with me:

A Palm Tree’s Christmas Wish by Pina Bird. A palm tree accidentally ends up in New England nursery in winter and immediately wants to be a chirstmas tree like the other trees around him

Middle Grade:

Deck the Halls We’re Off The Walls by Dan Gutman

Part of the Weird School series. A kid rapper Cray-Z comes to the same mall Santa is at. His fans get wild and chaos ensues. The back part of the book has word searches and other print games.

Level 3.4 Points 1

Upper Grade:

Winter Blunderland by James Patterson

Middle school Rafe has been invited to do a research study on polar bears, all expenses paid, AND Penelope his crush is also going. They soon find out they have poachers near them and the polar bears they are tracking suddenly goes silent.

Level 4.4 Points 4

HS/YA:

Let It Glow by Marissa Meyer and Joanne Levy

The cover is cute. Its the Christmas version of Parent Trap. It’s pretty funny. Twin sisters separated at birth by adoptions. One has a big theater kid personality, one has a super introvert wants to be an author personality. One family celebrates Christmas; one celebrates Hanukkah. The authors are drawing from their own lived experiences. Joanne is Jewish and celebrates Hanukkah, and is adopted. Marissa celebrates Christmas and has adopted twins.

Level 4.6 Points 10

Honey Pot Title

Minecraft: The lost journals by Mur Lafferty Level 5.5 points 10

The Diary of an 8 Bit Warrior by Cubekid Level 4.2 points 5

To see the complete list, here's the quick link to our Bookshop.Org shop.