Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief (Ernest Cunningham, #4) by Benjamin Stevenson (Goodreads Author)

Amy Caudill‘s review

Aug 22, 2026

This fourth installment of the series by author Benjamin Stevenson has our intrepid detective in the most ridiculous scenarios yet as he becomes a hostage during a bank robbery. Ernest Cunningham wants to get a loan to open a detective agency with his fiancée Juliette. However, no bank will lend to him, because he has nearly died on every case to date!

This last chance offer from a desperate bank president is his incentive to take on a missing person case, which leads to the discovery of multiple robberies on the same day, by multiple suspects inside the bank during the staged “heist.” True to form, Ernest uses his expertise as a how-to-write-a-mystery writer to attempt to resolve issues that only get more complicated when the bank robber dies in front of him after muttering that “she” cannot leave the bank without dying.

Unsure who “she” is, Ernest is not willing to take a chance on anyone, especially Juliette, becoming a murder victim. So Ernest takes the bank robber’s costume, and assumes his identity, hoping to prevent the pending crime. In a caper that will include people being locked in a safe and in a bank vault, spontaneous combustion as a murder weapon, and various and sundry minor crimes, will Ernest live long enough to solve the mystery, or will this be his last case?

As always, author Stevenson presents his mystery with a humorous homage to “golden age detective stories,” i.e. Agatha Christie, etc. His stories, delivered in the first person from the point of view of the “detective” contain matter of fact details with promises of no hidden clues or unconventional plot twists, but still manage to intrigue readers with quirky characters and simply good storytelling.

The narrator successfully withheld to nearly the end his own fate, which gave the story a dramatic but still-within-the-rules finish. I have enjoyed this series very much and give this latest volume five stars.