Murder Most Puzzling: Twenty Mysterious Cases to Solve

by Stephanie von Reiswitz

Murder Most Puzzling is a gorgeous and witty book that invites readers to play detective and solve a series of absorbing, murder-mystery-themed puzzles.

Readers are cast as the faithful sidekick to amateur sleuth Medea Thorne in order to solve 20 puzzling cases.

Meet a cast of colorful characters—from ghost hunter extraordinaire Augustin Artaud, to Leonard Fanshawe, a competitor in the Annual Perfect Pickled Foods Festival.

• A witty riff on the classic whodunit that brings out everyone's inner detective
• Each mystery is sumptuously illustrated.
• The mysteries require different deductive tactics, making them a good brain exercise

A body in the topiary garden, a death at a clairvoyants' convention, and the mysterious accident of the boating lake—prepare for a whirlwind adventure, laced with humor and a dash of the macabre.

This book will delight fans of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Gorey.

• This is a collection of darkly humorous puzzles.
• Features a clever die-cut cover, and illustrated in a gorgeous gothic style by Stephanie von Reiswitz
• Perfect gift for Edward Gorey fans, mystery buffs, puzzle addicts, and fans of true crime podcasts and TV shows
• Add it to the shelf with books like The Gashlycrumb by Edward Gorey, File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents by Lemony Snicket, and The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket.

Genres: Mystery, Puzzles, Mystery Thriller, Fiction, Short Stories

119 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 25, 2020

Reviews

[Jenny Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A fun little book with illustrated murder mysteries to solve. Some of the answers were a bit obscure but it was a fun way to pass the time.

[Dannii Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This ingenious little read allowed the reader to take on the role of detective, as they worked to solve the number of cases that featured here. I felt immersed in the book, which felt far more like a game from the very first paragraph, where the second person perspective was used:

Your decision to answer the small ad in the Gazette was mainly motivated by your meagre finances, and by the vague promise of excitement. Who hasn’t wondered what detectives do all day? And you do enjoy a good brain teaser, after all.

The introduction went on to detail that:

This book is a record of twenty of your adventures together, during which you’ve solved murders using lateral thinking, riddled out mathematical puzzles, noticed important clues, located stolen goods, and collected hard evidence to put the perpetrators away. Thanks to Medea Thorne’s unfortunate habit of dropping a few suggestive remarks about the crime before swanning off elsewhere, it’s down to you to do the leg work time and time again.

I enjoyed attempting to puzzle out these murder mysteries, even if I did only get three of the twenty correct. I read this book digitally and sometimes struggled to find clues in the pictures, when I could not zoom into them. Other times the answers were found in pictograms or homonyms, where I was entirely unaware there were any, or required some knowledge of poisons to piece together the myriad clues presented. These clues were definitely inventive but often very obscure or hard to find, even with the special hints included to aid the reader. I had fun here, regardless, if a little disappointed by my inability to perform as a good detective.

[Elease · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, the good: It's a very pretty book. I appreciate the artist's style. The story set-ups also have very whimsical names. A handful of the mysteries, but not most, have straightforward missions that do not require clues. Another few have clues that are actually helpful and allow you to solve.

But, more so, the bad: The story set-ups are extremely abrupt and at times you are asked to make a psychic leap to what is going on. Or, alternatively, you know what you need to look at or for, but you're not sure HOW exactly you're supposed to be examining those things...the single clue for each story in the back generally just confirms what you're looking for and is therefore unhelpful. By the last half of the book, I was completely unmotivated to take time with the mysteries if I didn't right away understand what I was supposed to be doing. Here are some specific issues:


In The Boating Lake, I saw the hidden pictures effect of the weapons on the clothes, but having weapon pictures embroidered on clothes does not mean guilt. As it's the third story, I hadn't quite picked up on the author's tendency to use hidden pictures as solutions. So, in vain, I kept searching this story and image, not knowing that I had already found the solution. ...a solution I still feel is too far a cry from reality.

One of the puzzles, Sweet Death, even has a error in the assigned number pattern (one of the sets involves adding consecutive prime numbers, but it starts with "3" not "2" AND skips "5"). Coincidentally, Sweet Death was the puzzle I enjoyed the most!

In The Funeral Party, I still maintain that the Room Stylist would also have been a likely candidate for murderer, as he would have been the one to order the sculptures. He could easily have gotten a stool! No way the case against Mallow even goes to court! I object! Also, who knew that those things were made of ice?! I thought they were statues!

Serial Murder: I just can't with this one. Nope.

At the end of A Haunting, we're asked to "prove the cause of the hauntings, and the motive and opportunity of the murder." I found the solution within a few minutes for the motive. But beyond just knowing that the hauntings were fake, I didn't know how I was supposed to prove the cause of the hauntings. Like, how did the guy rig all of this stuff up? How can I prove it? But, guess what, that's not really part of the evidence you need. Just figure out the motive, and you've got the rest. But I again wasted a lot of time looking for more evidence than was actually there.

Those are just notes for the first half. Like I said, my level of being engaged with these mysteries went way down by the second half.

This book is a nice idea, but it was executed poorly. The author thanks several people who helped her. Did none of these people give her helpful criticisms?? I was pretty disappointed and can't recommend.

[Adia · Rating 3 out of 5]

the art style grew on me...kind of creepy. a lot of picture searches and math-type puzzles, but it was still fun

[Alicia Impink · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall fun to pick up and do a puzzle nightly. A few were pretty straight-forward to solve, one or two were a bit trickier and one in particular annoyed me- no spoilers but you'd have to know what a particular poison would actually taste like in order to correctly figure out the solution. Other then that, it was a pleasant way to pass some time. I would acquire more puzzle-books like this

[Sonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tengo un vicio muy grande con los juegos de lógica, así que cuando salen libros como éste que consisten en resolver crímenes mediante diferentes pistas visuales, me cuesta mucho resistirme. Normalmente son una decepción, o muy fáciles o muy complejos... 'Crímenes misteriosos' tiene, en cambio, una dificultad muy variable, porque engloba tipos muy diferentes de enigmas.

De los 20 casos, en algunos tenemos que tirar de agudeza visual, en otros resolver crucigramas, en otros reflexionar sobre lo que nos piden... Hay juegos de lógica matemática, de asociación de ideas, de encontrar patrones... Vienen con unas pistas que te ayudan a saber exactamente qué tienes que buscar y, por supuesto, las soluciones.

Algo que me ha gustado mucho ha sido la ambientación y el perfil algo gamberro de la detective protagonista a la que servimos de ayudante y que siempre lo adivina todo antes que nosotros, pero nos deja el marrón de averiguarlo solos también. Por lo tanto el planteamiento me atrapó. Sin embargo, las ilustraciones no son demasiado de mi estilo, y a lo mejor hubiera disfrutado más del libro si el detalle de las ilustraciones hubiera sido más claro.

Aun así, ha sido muy entretenido ir resolviendo casos (cada vez mejor) y realizar deducciones en compañía. Aunque creo haber encontrado una errata en un caso matemático y eso me hizo desconfiar de todo el libro...

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

The illustrations are excellent, but the mysteries aren't great. In many cases, they seem to be designed solely to draw readers' attention to the illustrations. In most cases, the descriptions of the mysteries are too vague to draw the conclusions described in the solutions.

[Felix Baute · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really like the concept of this. I wanted it to be so much more. The art is nice, and I was hoping for a cozy complex mystery. The « stories » are like two pages long. The puzzles themselves are pricey and to then spend twenty-something for a book of such short stories. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really fun solve it yourself type book with amazing art that you need to fully absorb to get to the solution. Some were very difficult, while others were obvious but for the reasons you wouldn't think.

There are a set of puzzles with a similar style (put the puzzle together, find the solution in the art) and I'd like to try them out one day.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great concept; poor execution. The abstract illustration style was not conducive to solving visual mysteries, and some of the cases were just dumb. Also one of them had basic math errors in it. I would love a better executed version of this!

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

En este libro el lector es el protagonista, ya que es el ayudante de una detective privada, Medea Thorne, y debe resolver veinte casos de homicidios y robos utilizando la lógica, la observación de las ilustraciones, cálculos matemáticos, etc.

Es un entretenido libro para pasar el rato en las vacaciones. Stephanie von Reiswitz es la ilustradora de La leyenda de Sleepy Hollow y Rip Van Winkley, Otra vuelta de tuerca, Cuentos de Navidad y Cuentos de navidad misteriosos de Editorial Alma. Algunos casos son tramposos, otros son fáciles de resolver. La edición es preciosa. Es una buena opción para entretenerse en las vacaciones.

[Stephanie Rossman · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I love the premise of this book and admired the authors use of both story and pictures to solve a mystery, I thought that the mysteries were just too far-fetched. Some of them were literally impossible to solve. Others, I felt confident I had solved, but the actual answer was something very obscure.

My other issue, and this was to my fault, was that I read this book on an e-reader and it was impossible to enlarge the pictures. Many of the puzzles required great studying of the pictures, and I just wasn’t able to see enough detail.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murder Most Puzzling at first glance looks like a children’s book, but this illustrated brain tickler is, instead, full of puzzling mysteries for adult readers to play sleuth. Each ne to two page story is accompanied by a page of illustrations to help one unravel the solution to the mystery. Far from easy, but a delight for the little grey cells, and for the eyes, this is a wonderful way to pass the time and feel clever.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like other reviews say, this only sort of works as what it is. It's not a logic puzzle book really, and it isn't a book of short stories; it's a combination that doesn't know which direction to lean. A couple of the answers relied on INCREDIBLY obscure knowledge, and one of the solutions just made no sense (Sweet Death literally did not add up). Not bad, but not great either.

[Emmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can we talk for a moment about how fun this book was? Each story puts you right into the middle of the action, as the assistant to brilliant detective Medea Thorne. The puzzles were legitimately challenging (although I'm happy to say that I was able to figure most of them out) and many of them require the reader to have a basic understanding of poisons and other props. Lots of fun and a great way to spend a couple of evenings. The illustrations are awesome, too--creepy and artsy and a lot of fun.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these short mystery puzzles. The difficulty of the puzzles vary.

[Staf · Rating 1 out of 5]

De tekenstijl is niet mijn ding, tot daaraan toe, maar de puzzels zijn vergezocht en de raadsels en oplossingen zijn ook niet altijd op elkaar afgestemd. Sommige zelfs gewoonweg fout. Komaan, redactie! (Wel bijgeleerd: ‘lepidopterist’.)

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Puzzles were a bit tricky for me.

[Alex Garcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I own this book and have have picking up this book every so often to flip through. The premise is fun (like a choose your own adventure), the character Miss Thorne is interesting, and the art is gorgeous!

As an artist, I really like the art, though the book... not so much. Mysteries and who-done-it’s work best if you know the medium and have a lot of information hidden in the words or visuals. There were several instances that I knew I was looking at something but since the chapter story wasn’t long enough, I had no idea what they wanted. (Needing to know what a Lepidopterist is for example was quite irritating.)

Great idea, fun pictures, but the writing and mystery could have been better if they just were longer chapters. Even Sherlock Holmes would recount how he got to the solution for John/the audience to understand!

Longer stories or maybe photographs would have made this type of book work the best.

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

📚Murder Most Puzzling Peril at Quandary Park
✍🏻Stephanie Von Reiswitz
Blurb:
Murder Most Puzzling is a gorgeous and witty book that invites readers to play detective and solve a series of absorbing, murder-mystery-themed puzzles.

Readers are cast as the faithful sidekick to amateur sleuth Medea Thorne in order to solve 20 puzzling cases.

Meet a cast of colorful characters—from ghost hunter extraordinaire Augustin Artaud, to Leonard Fanshawe, a competitor in the Annual Perfect Pickled Foods Festival.

• A witty riff on the classic whodunit that brings out everyone's inner detective
• Each mystery is sumptuously illustrated.
• The mysteries require different deductive tactics, making them a good brain exercise

A body in the topiary garden, a death at a clairvoyants' convention, and the mysterious accident of the boating lake—prepare for a whirlwind adventure, laced with humor and a dash of the macabre.

This book will delight fans of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Gorey.

• This is a collection of darkly humorous puzzles.
• Features a clever die-cut cover, and illustrated in a gorgeous gothic style by Stephanie von Reiswitz
• Perfect gift for Edward Gorey fans, mystery buffs, puzzle addicts, and fans of true crime podcasts and TV shows
• Add it to the shelf with books like The Gashlycrumb by Edward Gorey, File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents by Lemony Snicket, and The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket.
My Thoughts:
Adelaide Hatchett has died. A heart attack. At a summer party. In her own greenhouse with all of the doors and windows locked. That's probably not a surprise as she was an older woman. However, Betrand Hellebore thinks there's something more to it. He and Adelaide weren't on great terms as he had been hired to make possets and potions specifically for her from the plants in her greenhouse. He left the house with hard feelings but doesn't believe he could have been disinherited. Adelaide must have been murdered. We are introduced to the people who were at her last party and given reasons why they might have wanted to kill her. There are puzzles on almost every page and they vary in easiness from medium to hard.
Thanks NetGalley, Chronicle Books and Author Stephanie Von Reiswitz for the advanced copy of "Murder Most Puzzling Peril at Quandary Park" I am leaving my voluntary review in appreciation.
#NetGalley
#ChronicleBooks
#MurderMostPuzzlingPerilatQuandaryPark
#StephanieVonReiswitz
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Lindsay · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a clever idea, but poorly executed. I had issues with more than half the puzzles, either due to mistakes in the pictures or solution, illustrations not being clear or defined enough, missing information in the story, expecting the reader to have knowledge of obscure facts, or unrealistic portrayals. See below for problems with specific cases:
The Collector: The eggs should have been Jade colored, otherwise the reader will be looking for a missing Jade egg & come to the wrong conclusion. The Boating Lake: People having pictures of weapons on their clothes are not a realistic portrayal of guilt. Sweet Death: II-The solution does not match the numbers provided. III- 14 + 6 does not equal 22. VIII- There are not two 16's on the counter, as solution II is supposedly 16. However, all these numbers add up to 81. Was the wrong solution matched with the wrong problem #? Serial Murder: It was unclear the jar was a jam jar--I thought it was an urn of ashes. The bottle of ethyl acetate needed to be spelled out. Poisoned Patisserie: The fact that Strychnine is a bitter poison is essential to the story, but that fact was not included in the story. Deadly Preserves: How could readers assume that a spoon is made of poisonous wood without any sort of clue in the original story? That's an absurd leap of logic. A Dangerous Dinner: Many relationships were unclear and lacked details in the story. The Cruciverbalist Case: There is an extra "I" circled. Also, how did Thorne know which letters to circle? The Missing Will: Safe combinations are typically 4 numbers. If we were looking for a longer combination, it should have been explicitly stated. The Explorer Returns: This solution only works if you can prove the flea circus is a local event, & not a foreign one. It needs to be clearer that the boat ticket date was for departure--not a return home date. If she wasn't in Papua New Guinea for the last 6 months, and she wasn't at home, then where has she been? It doesn't make sense to have a 6-month window of that we can't prove, rather than a 1-week window.

[ashes ➷ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a weird one, because with just a few extremely specific changes, this entire book would jump to five stars.

If you've been following my adventures with this book at all, this will not come as a surprise. I've been hacking my way through the puzzles, forcing handsome women to solve with me, and somehow still being excited to take a crack at each new puzzle even as I know I'm just as likely to wind up frustrated, because some of the puzzles are typoed so hard they are impossible to solve.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The premise of the book is super fun; you're (second-person!) a new apprentice to an accomplished Sherlock-type who nonetheless is more interested in going out drinking than actually solving the crimes. Most of the time she comes with you to a crime scene, tells you it should be easy to solve, and then promptly flounces. I'm kind of in love with this woman, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere and characters throughout the book; it genuinely serves everything it promises in that regard. It's also casually racially diverse, which is a pleasant surprise for an aesthetic which can be extremely white.

Speaking of aesthetic-- I really like the art! It's painted in a manner which can get quite sprawling and messy, making it befitting not only of murder mysteries but also of melodramatic makeup and finery, houses with long shadows, and dark gloomy skies. It doesn't, um, quite fit teeny-tiny details in Where's Waldo style puzzle spreads, though...

This book taught me an important lesson: that a puzzle book can have a lot of great puzzles, can even be mostly great puzzles, but all it takes is one unsolvable puzzle to lose your faith in the rest of the entire book. And this book has a lot of borderline-to-genuinely unsolvable puzzles.

A description of the general types of puzzles, with some notes on notable ones:

SPOT-THE-ITEM PUZZLERS: Any puzzle requiring you to look through all the items on the page to find a specific thing, usually with some small amount of logic-puzzling (e.g. which of these items is missing? who could have hidden it for use as a murder weapon?) generally worked really well. This is the book's great strength! And, fortunately, the majority of the puzzles fell into this category. These are:
The Collector, Pickled Delights, The Chocolate Box, The Hesperides, The Funeral Party, A Haunting, Death in the Fountain, Deadly Preserves, Halloween, The Clairvoyants' Convention, The Explorer Returns.

PSYCHIC LEAPS: Anything where it felt like you really had to be aware of something either the puzzle was asking of you or about the situation that most people would not get (based on both GR comments and fellow solvers IRL). This is obviously ridiculous, though what fits in the category is pretty subjective.

The Boating Lake asks you to find murder weapons on the persons of several people in a photo, but rather than literally having weapons on them (as in the previous puzzle, picklething), the author apparently means illustrated in the pattern of their clothing, except one of them literally does have a giant sharp thing in disguise as an accessory which is listed as the solution for them. This is the third puzzle, and it comes right after a puzzle that uses the same concept literally, and it threw me off hard enough to question what the heck I was supposed to be doing in the rest of them. If I'm asked to find a murder weapon, am I actually finding a murder weapon, or am I just looking for a drawing of one on a coat? The clue does say to look at their clothing, but I did that in the last one, and I saw that someone had the right type of bag-- this feels completely different. And it was the second puzzle! Going back through, I see nothing threw us off quite like this, which makes me feel as though just this one puzzle really tainted our ability to predict how we were expected to solve anything else.

Serial Murder is not half as bad as that, but I was a bit annoyed that even with a couple of friends we got stuck after the point that we figured out clearly there was something going on re: butterflies even though we knew the term "lepidopterist" because there's just enough ambiguity to allow for a couple of words to be in the place of F, I think. Not a huge deal and I doubt anyone else had this struggle but we really scratched our heads. I kind of think NSoL or something like that would've made more sense to avoid the ambiguity.

Poisoned Patisserie requires you to know what a certain poison tastes like...?? And how to mask the flavor? Please be serious.

SKILL-BASED PUZZLES
Puzzles that require a specific skill not everyone has to solve. I liked these, even though they were generally based on skills (like math and crosswords) that I don't really have! I felt encouraged to work with a friend rather than give up.

Sweet Death is a really good idea for a puzzle-- you have to work out mathematical puzzles in sweet-shop displays to solve which jar on the counter is the odd one out. However, the puzzle is impossible to solve, as the math is incorrect on the second part-- section II contains jars reading 6, 25, 64, 32, and 1, and the expected conclusion is that we realize 16 goes there because they're all square numbers from 1-6-- but they're not! 2x2=/=6, 3x3 is 9, 6x6=36, and 64 is the square of 8. 3/5 available clues in that instance are wrong! More than half! I believe there was even more off in this one, but at that point, it's not even worth continuing. Did nobody proofread this, or playtest it? It seems like something that would come up instantly.

The Cruciverbalist Case is a crossword and it is delightful but, oh my god, the proofreader left the building again and we wound up with blanks that read _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _, and the answer is meant to be IT'S UNDER YOUR NOSE. So, you know. Solvable, just irritating.

Puzzles with other skill-based things (even if they were just logic puzzles) which didn't drive me batty in a bad way: The Topiary Garden, A Dangerous Dinner, A Murder in the Laboratory, The Missing Will.

So I really do think this is super cute-- I think I actually got way more invested than any reasonable person; I thought the characters and setting and premise and basically everything was incredibly fun and just lost my mind over the few puzzles that didn't work-- but when you hit upon multiple puzzles that are not realistically solvable, you start giving up much faster, because you have no idea whether your time will be well spent genuinely working through the puzzles. I bought this book for my partner and I don't know if I regret it! Woe. Hopefully this is all fixed in a future edition.

[Authentikate · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you love mysteries, solving puzzles, games, this book *may* (maybe) be for you.

I thought it was for me. Logic games, puzzles of all kinds, deductive reasoning all strong suits of mine and activities I do to relax.

This wasn’t relaxing.

It was frustrating.

Perhaps I am too literal. Maybe my brain isn’t as plastic and flexible as it would need to be to maneuver this sort of book. But many times I found myself wondering what gives?

For many of the puzzles, the objectives themselves aren’t clear. Here, the book may be better suited for those who are not literal. If your quest *seems* to be about identifying one thing or one type of thing, don’t hold too tightly to that—the author will switch it up on you without warning and you will have been required to identify something (or someone) else entirely. It won’t matter that the object *appears* to lead you in one direction. You will need to intuit the other angles Willy-Nilly.

For other puzzles the objectives are clear but the art isn’t.

And yet for some, errors in logic or solution will make frustrations raise even higher.

That’s the take away: it doesn’t matter what one *thinks* they are set out to find. Keep an open mind to any number of possible tributaries.

I think the puzzles were after thoughts to support the art which isn’t as crisp and well-reading as needed. Here, even the art itself requires some suspension of belief and more than squinted eyes. The artist will require one to identify something as something else even when the image is hazy at best.

[Gina Lento · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so much fun! My husband received it as a gift. On first appearance I thought it was a book on how to host a murder party, lol. When I thumbed through it I realized it was an adult version of Encyclopedia Brown meets where’s Waldo. This book is exceptionally clever and I hope there’s more books like this out there. I assumed it would be a quick read but the puzzles were indeed, puzzles, and took some time to solve. One puzzle was a party guest placement, which anyone planning a wedding or any large sit down party with seating assignments knows, you have to watch where you put certain family members or friends or the party could get more “interesting” than planned, lol. I actually mapped out seating placement on Procreate.
This book was lots of fun and I LOVED the illustrations! Very inspiring!

[O'Donnell O'Donnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to buy this for myself for so long but my friend gave it to me for my birthday. I really wanted to like this. The art work is beautiful and I love the genre and idea. The instructions were vague unless you looked at the clues. There were parts where I think there were multiple answers available that would have made more sense than the one used. Also because it is searching for bits and pieces, the abstract art work feeling like the book is cheating. I've looked at the picture and at the answers and thought 'what do you mean these don't look the same, the one over here is far more different?" Or "how does x look like a y, it's a blurred dot". It's like where's Waldo but the original picture got wet first and became too smudged. I really wanted to like this and I was so excited too.

[Izzati · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of puzzles where you act as the assistant to Medea Thorne, one of the world's greatest detectives. As her sidekick, you are often put in a position to know what to do without her spelling it out for you. She expects you to know the who, how, where, etc of every case.

What I love about this book is how colourful and gorgeous the illustrations are. But not just that. I thought those pictures are just to complement the words, but they're actually part of the puzzle! You're expected to study the pictures for clues to solve the riddles.

Some of the puzzles are clever, some are too simplistic, but they were all a joy to attempt.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea behind this is so fun, but it falls a little short here and there.

For instance, in the puzzle where you have to find people in the crowd, it would help if the illustrations of the characters matched a little better with the recreations. Given the loose illustration style, almost anyone in the crowd could have been the suspects we are looking for.

There were also terms and words I'd never heard of which made solving some of the puzzles impossible without googling for some assistance.

All that being said, would I still share this book with others? Absolutely. With someone who has more patience than I do.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun, brain-teaser type book. Filled with short stories and good illustrations, the reader is called upon to try to solve mysteries using clues that are literally right before the eyes. For more help, there are additional clues for each mystery given in the back of the book. Solutions to each of the 20 mysteries are presented.

I completed this in about two hours, but will most likely keep it for anyone who might be visiting, or to pull out again to see if I can solve these twisters some other time.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dive into work with private detective Medea Thorne who has hired the reader as an assistant. Break out your complex problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and, at times, morbid knowledge so you can keep pace with the incomparable Thorne. While the span of crimes, puzzles, and visual clues is impressive, the solutions often rely on previous knowledge.

With opulent and enchanting artwork along with grabbing premises, a variety of clues, and an all-knowing detective, Stephanie von Reiswitz creates twenty mysteries to solve best intended for groups.

[charlotte nurse · Rating 2 out of 5]

fun idea, love the art and aesthetic

writing and actual “puzzles” leave a lot to be desired. many of them require you to make an assumption or suspend belief and go with it which is fine… i guess? but many of the mysteries don’t really have enough in them to feel like you’ve /proved/ anything.

for a handful of the mysteries i sort of just had the vibe of an answer with no real evidence to support it but when i looked at the answer my vibe was correct but there was no explanation or a VERY stupid one.

questionable clothing patterns does not a murderer make!