Mysteries are such a tricky genre because, regardless of the sort of mystery you're interested in, they're very bound by their rules and the more they break from the rules, the less of a mystery they are and when the rules were basically defined and broken most significantly a hundred years ago you have a real shadow looming over you if you want to tackle that kind of mystery.
Australian author and comedian Benjamin Stevenson grabs your face in the first pages of "Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone", saying 'watch what I'm going to do'. A first-person mystery novel ostensibly written by the protagonist, Stevenson-via-protagonist-Ernest not only gives you the rules for mystery novels, he tells you all the pages on which someone dies. He addresses the kinds of sneaky ways mystery authors will obfuscate the real killer in their novels and promises these things will not happen, this is going to be a fair play old school mystery.
Ernest Cunningham is a writer of how-to-write-x guides who is reluctantly attending a family reunion hosted at a ski resort. They're getting together to celebrate the release of Ernest's elder brother from prison. Ernest is the least liked member of his family, particularly by his mother, and everyone in the Cunningham family has killed someone. A tense family situation becomes tenser when a sudden storm traps them on the mountain after the arrival of Ernest's brother when a Cunningham turns up dead and every other Cunningham, including Ernest, has a motive.
It is not up to Ernest to find the real killer, no one, in fact, really wants him to find the real killer, but he's going to do it anyway.
Stevenson writes a clever, occasionally bleakly funny, mystery that has a self-aware cheekiness that keeps it from feeling smug, even in the depths of the meta narrative. The book is structured in chunks with family backstory to the reunion being spun in the background, each grouping of chapters explaining the circumstances of each of his family members killing someone, from his convicted murderer brother to his surgeon stepsister. It's a neat way to weave clues and explain motives in the absence of Ernest having a sidekick to explain things to, or a cast more supportive of his mystery solving.
Stevenson's written a sequel, "Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect" that came out at the beginning of this year, which I will have to grab at some point. "Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone" packs some unexpected punches and all the personal threads leading back to Ernest give the structure gravitas instead of gimmickry; it'll be interesting to see how Stevenson develops his approach because this is not going to be an easy book to follow-up.