That was fun. (as I look back at the first book, I realize now that I've started the posts nearly identically).
Sometimes that's all you really need a book to be. The first book was the same way. That one was audio, so it felt more like a radio performance than anything else. This one because it was an ebook was quicker to get through, though maybe not quite as much fun as a result.
To revisit the first book, our narrator is a low-rent whodunnit expert (re: he publishes pamphlets on how to write a genre he's never written before) until a real life mystery unfolds in his life, and he writes up the results for us, the brave reader.
It's a silly concept, and I loved it. It wasn't a perfect book, but it was fun.
But how do you write a sequel where you narrator acknowledges the genre they exist in? Well, not Deadpool style, but close enough.
You send them to a literary conference on a train with a bunch of other mystery writers, and then you add dead bodies.
We pick up not too terribly long after the first book has ended. Ernest, our protagonist, has published his book, and gets invited to be on a writers panel. His girlfriend, whom we meet in the first book, also wrote a book, which was more successful, though she's not on the panel for some reason.
What keeps me from giving either book 5 stars is the thing that makes them what they are: He's telling you the whole time what he's doing, so that does take away from some of the fun. BUT it's still fun. It gets to be snarkier as a result.
Making this trick work twice is, well, a trick.
The first one gets the benefit of being a new thing. The second one then has to inhabit that universe and go from there. This isn't the same thing as a detective series, where you expect a cop or a private investigator to get pulled into the problem. This is just a guy trying to live his life when the problems pull him in.
One of the better ideas that this book has is this notion that everyone on the train knows he's going to want to write a book about the events unfolding on the train, so everyone has to get self-referential as a result. Some of this is lighthearted fun, such as him saying he couldn't have committed the murder because he's the narrator. But some of it gets to heavier ideas, such as the fact that he's putting himself at the center of a story that he's not really at the center of. He's really just a supporting character who happens to be documenting the situation.
And of course it's all fiction, but you have to believe the universe it's in for it to work. This is partly why I'm probably done reading Sarah J. Maas books. The internal consistency is lacking even if I still want to know what happens next.
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