Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

COMING SOON

Author’s Note or An Apology to Ferroequinologists

Those with a knowledge of trains will have noticed I’ve made some deliberate changes to the real-life Ghan to meet the needs of the plot. The most obvious of these are that the Ghan does not have a smoking deck, and I have teleported the Chairman’s Carriage from a different train. Consider my inaccuracies to also extend to both the murderousness of the clientele and any deficiencies portrayed in the comfort of the journey. In particular, I am grateful to the truly exceptional staff, who didn’t once call the police as I questioned them on the feasibility of various murders.

Acknowledgments

None of the characters in this book are based on real people, and, if anything, they are the complete opposite of the incredibly welcoming community of talented writers and booksellers and publishing professionals who have boosted me up in so many different ways, not only with this book but throughout my entire career.

Ernest learned something in this book that I’ve known all along: no book is written alone.

I am grateful to be on the receiving end of many people’s talents: my amazing publishers (Beverley Cousins, Katherine Nintzel and Grace Long); my brilliant agents (Pippa Masson, assisted by Caitlan Cooper-Trent, for books, and Leslie Conliffe, assisted by Kris Karcher, for film, and my endless thanks to Jerry Kalajian); superb editors (Amanda Martin and Molly Gendell); the incredible marketing and publicity teams (Tavia Kowalchuk, Tanaya Lowden, Hannah Ludbrook, and Jennifer Harlow); those involved with international rights (Sarah McDuling, Neil Godwin and Anna Ristevski of Penguin Random House Australia, and Kate Cooper and Nadia Mokdad of Curtis Brown London); my cover designer (Adam Laszczuk); proofreader (Sonja Heijn); and typesetters (Midland Typesetters).

Thank you to every bookseller who pressed Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone into someone’s hands over the last year and a half, and for again supporting this book with such passion and kindness. Thank you to every reader—what Ernest says about fingerprints and legacies is true, and thank you for leaving yours here.

Lastly, and always, thank you to my supportive, welcoming family: Peter, Judy, Emily and James Stevenson; and Gabriel, Elizabeth, Lucy and Adrian Paz.

And Aleesha Paz. Our story is my favorite story.

About Mariner Books

Mariner Books traces its beginnings to 1832 when William Ticknor cofounded the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, from which he would run the legendary firm Ticknor and Fields, publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Following Ticknor’s death, Henry Oscar Houghton acquired Ticknor and Fields and, in 1880, formed Houghton Mifflin, which later merged with venerable Harcourt Publishing to form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. HarperCollins purchased HMH’s trade publishing business in 2021 and reestablished their storied lists and editorial team under the name Mariner Books.

Uniting the legacies of Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, and Ticknor and Fields, Mariner Books continues one of the great traditions in American bookselling. Our imprints have introduced an incomparable roster of enduring classics, including Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau’s Walden, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Ann Petry’s The Narrows, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and many others. Today Mariner Books remains proudly committed to the craft of fine publishing established nearly two centuries ago at the Old Corner Bookstore.