elisa

April 2026

This month I read 7 ebooks from the Toronto Public Library, and 1 epub, totalling to 8 books.

The numbers as they stand as of April 30th, 2026:

Total Reading Goal: 36/100 (+8)

COMPLETED: Canada Reads Shortlist: 5/5

Canada Reads Longlist: 6/10 (+1) –Celestina’s House by Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez

Nonfiction Goal: 2/12 – nothing to add this month

TPL Reading Challenge: 11/25 (+2) – First in a Series: Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone – Overcoming Adversity: Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead

Ernest Cunningham Series by Benjamin Stevenson

#1: Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

TPL Reading Challenge: First in a series

Synopsis: Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate.

I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that.

Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let's get started.

#2: Everyone On This Train is a Suspect

Synopsis

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty:

the debut writer (me!) – the forensic science writer – the blockbuster writer – the legal thriller writer – the literary writer – the psychological suspense writer

But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime. Of course, we should also know how to commit one. How can you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?

#3: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret

Synopsis:

My name’s Ernest Cunningham. I used to be a fan of reading Golden Age murder mysteries, until I found myself with a haphazard career getting stuck in the middle of real-life ones. I’d hoped, this Christmas, that any self-respecting murderer would kick their feet up and take it easy over the holidays. I was wrong.

So here I am, backstage at the show of world-famous magician Rylan Blaze, whose benefactor has just been murdered. My suspects are all professional tricksters: masters of the art of misdirection.

THE MAGICIAN – THE ASSISTANT – THE EXECUTIVE – THE HYPNOTIST – THE IDENTICAL TWIN – THE COUNSELLOR – THE TECH

My clues are even more abstract: A suspect covered in blood, without a memory of how it got there. A murder committed without setting foot inside the room where it happens. And an advent calendar. Because, you know, it’s Christmas.

If I can see through the illusions, I know I can solve it.

After all, a good murder is just like a magic trick, isn’t it?

#4: Everyone in This Bank is a Thief

Synopsis:

The doors are chained shut. No one in or out. Which means that when someone in the bank is murdered, everyone is a suspect.

The Bank Robber – The Manager – The Security Guard – The Kid – The Film Producer – The Priest – The Receptionist – The Patient – The Caregiver – Me

Turns out, more than one person planned to rob the bank today. You can steal more from a bank than just money.

Who is stealing what? Are they willing to kill for it? And can I solve the crime before the police kick down the door and rescue us?

My Collected Thoughts:

I’m pulling an oldie but goodie move, and I’ve decided to review this whole series together, since I have a lot of shared opinions about these books. I previously read book #1 in August 2023, and book #2 in March 2024, both of which were reviewed on this blog. I initially was planning to read just book #4, but realized that book #3 is a cannon entry in the series and not just a silly Christmas novella. In a stroke of good fortune, all four ebooks were available at the same time through my library, so I just decided to re-read the whole series, especially because I didn’t remember #1 or #2 particularly well. I initially wasn’t going to include #1 and #2 in my overall count since they are rereads, but now that I’m tracking things on Storygraph it would desync my statistics from this blog, and I do want them to be aligned. In my defense, it also has been over a year since I read them, so I don’t think I’m committing too much of a crime.

Overall, I liked books #1 and #2 more reading them the second time around, but I didn’t like #3 and #4 as much. I think this can be attributed to the fact that the protagonist Ernest Cunningham makes a great narrator, but kind of a bad character. Let me elaborate. This whole series involves a lot of meta narration. Ernest recounts each story as he’s writing it, and often will interject during the writing process. Eg, in book #2, he informs us that the killer’s name will be mentioned 106 times in total, and occasionally checks in to let us know how many times each suspect’s name has been said. In book #4, Ernest recounts the majority of the story while being locked in a safe, and intersperses the story with his struggles to escape the safe and also ration his limited oxygen. In general, these books tend to follow Ronald Knox’s rules for classic golden age mysteries, and they are also fair play mysteries, meaning that all of the clues needed to solve the murder are reliably made available to the reader. Readers will know that even though I’m an avid mystery reader, I don’t usually try to solve the case. While I enjoy collecting and noticing clues, I’m happy to just be along for the ride. Part of the reason that I think I enjoyed the rereads more is that I was better able to pick up on all of the clues, hidden meanings, and general hints that were included. It’s also what makes these books compelling, and what makes Ernest such a great narrator.

On the other hand, Ernest is a terrible character. He is obsessed with solving the mystery at any costs, and it gets more and more ridiculous as the series goes on. In book #1, this quality feels serious, as Ernest is worried for his own life, and is driven to both solve his brother’s murder and unravel family lore. Book #2 is set at a mystery writer’s convention, and this is when we start to get the trope of the mystery writer trying to solve a mystery irl, which seems to be Ernest’s whole shtick. Time and again, he continually pushes his girlfriend Juliette aside, and is a total ass to her, because he’s obsessed with solving the mystery. Book #3 is just ridiculous, because it’s about a troupe of magicians and is also all Christmas themed, which is kind of cringe. I thought the advent calendar of clues was cool, but the “true meaning of Christmas” being Chris + Mas aka Chris + Sam” was a step too far. Book #4 is the most egregious. It is a bank heist (readers will know I love a heist) but in the first third of the book, Ernest sees the main bank robber get killed, and then decides to IMPERSONATE the bank robber and CONTINUE TO KEEP HOSTAGES because he’s obsessed with solving the mystery and thinks he won’t get another chance to. This is absolutely insane, full stop. (This book also has someone die through spontaneous combustion caused by a pocketful of pistachios, which I think is too far for a fair play mystery).

Overall, I’d give this series a 4/5 for a great concept, but it is starting to wear on me a little.

Celestina’s House by Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez

Canada Reads Longlist 2026

Synopsis:

It begins with an act of betrayal. What follows is a wave of malas that destroys the tenuous bonds of Celestina Errantes’s family. For years, she longs to escape her unhappy home, until an unexpected gift from her wealthy Lolo offers a chance at escape. A long-forsaken and haunted property in Manila’s bohemian district, close to where the “low-flying doves” ply their trade. It is no place for a proper young lady, but the house makes Celestina feel at home. Celestina tears into life as a wild child and loses herself in the pleasures of the night. Many life lessons later, she grows up. She captivates an aristocratic restaurateur who promises a new life, in a home without ghosts. Then a voice from the past brings sinister whispers, threatening to drive them apart forever. Can Celestina confront the evil in her house and pull love out of the fire?

My thoughts:

This is the book that makes me question why I am reading the Canada Reads Longlist. The longlist has 15 books on it in total, which is a lot of books even for me (especially when you consider that it’s 15 books that are not necessarily to my taste, or things that I would want to read. The whole point of reading the longlist is to broaden my horizons, but trying to read them all in the span of a couple months has started to put me into a slump. I did not particularly enjoy reading Celestina’s House, and because my queue is so stacked with longlist members (that I’m not particularly looking forward to), it makes me not want to read.

Specifically for Celestina’s House, I thought that the concept of a young girl inheriting an old house haunted by the ghost of her ancestors had a lot of potential, but it was wasted almost immediately. There was no story to discover about great-aunt Selena since her backstory was revealed to the reader almost immediately, and she was reduced to a handful of mentions throughout the rest of the book. So what was the point of having her there? It was the same way for the ghost of Manang Rio. Antonio’s power to astral project was also not really used to the fullest, in my opinion. It was just used to show that he was a creative genius, but when Celestina cut contact with him, he didn’t appear until the end of the story when he started harassing her most recent boyfriend. I know that her deciding to not kill her father was supposed to have cured the malas hanging over her, but it didn’t really feel like it changed anything, because the story ended very shortly after. Like what was the point of even including it. Honestly, the magical realism parts of the story felt so minor that I would straight up classify this book as historical fiction, with barely any fantasy elements at all.

Overall, I felt like Celestina was just floating through her own story, and that she didn’t really have a lot of agency. For all of her relationships, men were just drawn to her by her exquisite beauty and charm, and she would invite them to move into the house, and then the relationship would break down or run its course, and they would break up and she would move on to someone new. It almost felt like reading about a manic pixie dream girl, in a weird way.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Synopsis:

This book follows a year in the life of the Bennet sisters (Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty & Lydia) as they meet new people, encounter suitors, and become married women.

My thoughts:

Unfortunately this book didn’t have quite enough drive to really make it a successful book club pick. For me, it was a huge “nothing ever happens” book for the first two-thirds. However, I felt that it started to pick up when Lydia eloped with Wickham. I probably will never be a Jane Austen girlie, but I can appreciate this novel for what it was, especially when compared to the 2005 movie with Kiera Knightly (which was lovely in its own right, but really missed a lot of the commentary and internal thoughts of the characters). If I had one complaint, it’s that I still don’t fully understand the social context of the time, so I think that limits my understanding and enjoyment of the book. I specifically read an annotated edition, which did help a bit for this issue but had two conflicting effects of not fully explaining enough but also explaining so much that it made the book much longer to read.

Rating: 3/5 letters abruptly handed to you, and then the receiver walks quickly away

The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clark

Synopsis:

Six authors.

One private island.

Seventy-two hours to write the ending that will change their lives.

Arthur Fletch, one of the world’s bestselling novelists, is a reclusive genius known for his iconic protagonists and fiendish twists. When six struggling authors are invited to spend a weekend on his private Scottish island, they arrive to discover a shocking secret: Arthur Fletch is dead . . . and his last book is unfinished.

Desperate to publish the novel, Fletch’s agent and editor have summoned these writers in the hope that one of them will imagine a worthy ending for this final book. To sweeten the deal, they are offering an irresistible prize: in addition to ghost-writing the last chapter––for a mind-boggling sum––they will also help the lucky writer successfully re-launch their own career, guaranteeing future bestsellers. The catch: the writers have just seventy-two hours to finish Fletch’s magnum opus.

It’s the perfect plot. All it needs is a killer ending.

My thoughts:

When I say I’m looking for a mystery novel, this is what I’m hoping for. I found this book to be very engrossing; the plot was fast-paced and driven, the setting was atmospheric, the characters were each very compelling (admittedly some more than others), and overall it was a very enjoyable read. My favourite character was Sienna, because I really appreciated her drive and determination to finally move on from her useless husband who was taking all of their credit when she was the one doing most of the writing. She also was the first character to create an ending for the book, and she seemed like one of the more competent authors. So it was so tragic that she was the first to die. I did like that many of the characters died just as they wrote an ending to the book, or as they read someone else’s ending, it was very poetic. I also thought that the title was a cool reference to the eventual reveal, which was that one of the authors scammed everyone by AI-generating a book.

Rating: 4/5 dollhouses that are a perfect replica of the house that you in, complete with secret passages and working record players

Cleo Dang Would Rather be Dead by Mai Nguyen

TPL Reading Challenge: Overcoming adversity

Synopsis:

All Cleo Dang has ever wanted was to be a mother. The day she discovers she’s pregnant is the happiest of her life, especially when she learns that her best friend, Paloma, is also expecting. It’s a wonderful surprise and together, they enjoy their pregnancies. But when they both go to the hospital in labor, something goes very, very wrong. Paloma comes home with a baby. Cleo does not.

Now a grieving Cleo must navigate life after losing her baby. She alienates herself from the world, especially her best friend who is living the life she so desperately wanted. Forced to quit her demanding job as an actuary, Cleo manages to find a job at a funeral home where she meets a revolving door of bereaved locals and discovers the power of confronting grief.

My thoughts:

This book was a very heartbreaking and moving picture of grief, messy in a way that felt very true to lived experiences (which makes sense because the author had suffered a similar loss which inspired the book). It made me cry so many times. Probably the most devastating part was that Cleo was no longer able to maintain her friendship with Paloma because it was too painful and she also was mostly unable to function. To me it felt especially painful because Paloma and Cleo were best friends who grew up together, did everything together, lived on the same street, got pregnant and gave birth at the same time; having their lives diverge so traumatically definitely added to the overall pain. My only issue with the book was that I wish the funeral home where Cleo ended up working had played a larger role. But overall, I thought that this book was devastating and excellent. I’ll be going back to read Mai Nguyen’s earlier book Sunshine Nails, so hopefully that one is just as good but way less sad.

Rating:4/5 journals with diary entries of you and your baby

Full Disclosure by Beverly McLachlin

!Full Disclosure](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515508032i/37880604.jpg)

Synopsis:

When everyone has something to hide, the truth is the only defense.

There’s nothing Jilly Truitt likes more than winning a case, especially against her former mentor, prosecutor Cy Kenge. Jilly has baggage, the residue of a dark time in a series of foster homes, but that’s in the past. Now she’s building her own criminal defense firm and making a name for herself as a tough-as-nails lawyer willing to take risks in the courtroom.

When the affluent and enigmatic Vincent Trussardi is accused of his wife Laura’s murder, Jilly agrees to defend him, despite predictions that the case is a sure loser and warnings from those close to her to stay away from the Trussardi family. Determined to prove everyone wrong, Jilly investigates Laura’s death, hoping to discover a shred of evidence that might give the jury a reasonable doubt. Instead, she is confronted by damning evidence and uncooperative witnesses at every turn. Someone isn’t telling the truth, but who?

With her reputation and Vincent’s life on the line, Jilly tries to unravel the web of secrets surrounding Laura’s murder. As she digs deeper, she uncovers a startling revelation that will change not only the case, but her life forever.

My thoughts:

I really wanted to like this book. I was looking for a basic crime thriller to read and I was so hopeful when I found this one set in Canada written by a Canadian woman (Beverly McLaughlin, the former chief justice of Canada). However, it just didn’t really hit for me. I really disliked how Jilly’s personal life became super entangled in the case when it didn’t need to. It involved her boyfriend, who was cousins with the victim, but then also involved her old social worker, and her foster family, and also 2 separate cases that she was also working on. I think the author was trying to make it seem like all of the threads were tied up neatly, but instead she ended up making a tangled mess that I was not particularly interested in. I don’t think I’ll be reading any of the other books in the series, which is a shame, because now I have a craving for Canadian crime fiction that is actually good.

Rating: 2/5 pieces of Indigenous art that are definitely not related to the plot at all

i am, your most faithful blogger, elisa