Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (Ernest Cunningham, #2)

by Benjamin Stevenson

I tried to weigh up the attendees, to better gauge how the rest of my long weekend was likely to play out, or, more specifically, which wannabe—embittered by years of rejection from publishers, clutching a coffee-stained handwritten manuscript and ready to spring it on you at any time—was best avoided. The carriage had a celebratory air to it, the pre-disembarkment holiday excitement that accompanies the phrase It’s five o’clock somewhere and a glass of champagne that you don’t really want but got anyway because it feels like an adequate signpost that you’re up for a good time. It was still before breakfast, but that didn’t matter to most. Holidays are, after all, mostly extravagant charades with which to justify an addiction. A group of three silver-haired women who’d staked out a booth clinked glasses amid cheering and laughter that seemed to prove my theory.