Note: There will be spoilers in this book review.
One day, I went to one of my favorite bookstores and found a book called Murder Most Puzzling: Twenty Mysterious Cases to Solve. I loved the book cover and the illustrations inside the book. Also, I liked the idea of trying to solve the mysteries inside the book. So I decided to give it a try and buy it.
The owner of the bookstore had said that people had found the mysteries inside the book hard to solve, but I wanted to try it out anyway.
While I do not regret buying the book, I do find it disappointing.
For one thing, while the watercolor illustrations were beautiful, they were also unclear. One mystery in the book requires you to find criminals in a crowd, but the way the author (who is the artist of the book) depicts the criminals makes it somewhat difficult to identify one of them. I was able to find the other two, though.
Also, in another mystery, you must look at a suspect’s room and find the same clues the detective found in there. One clue is a ribbon from a box of chocolates. However, though I saw the ribbon, I could not tell whether or not it was actually a ribbon. To me, it almost looked like bacon.
Another thing I dislike about the book is that the mysteries often require leaps of logic to solve, and information or lack thereof is much too obscure to be of any help. For example, one mystery requires you to find out which person in a photograph murdered a guy. Instead of being given concrete clues, you have to look at each person’s clothing and see which ones have the design of a weapon on it. For instance, one person had a dagger or sword in the design of their shirt. Therefore, the author concludes in the answer section, the ones with the weapon designed on their clothing is indeed a murderer.
This makes no sense. Anyone can wear a shirt with an image of a sword on it, but it doesn’t mean they’re secretly murderers. That was one of the most ridiculous mysteries in the book.
Another mystery that I found to be ridiculous was one that involved cake. In this mystery, the reader must figure out the baker who poisoned the cake and killed the head baker. But the only hints given were each employees’ allergies and one baker’s skills at piping. While I was able to discern who did it, I wasn’t able to figure out the cake that was poisoned. In the solutions, it stated that the Bitter Coffee Chocolate Cake was the one poisoned because the poison used in it was bitter. However, no one in the story said that the poison was bitter, and the information used isn’t common knowledge! So how was I supposed to know that the poison was used in that cake when I wasn’t given enough information about it?
Finally, another flaw of this book is that one mystery is just plain wrong. In this mystery, the reader is tasked with finding out which jar of candy in a candy shop was poisoned, and you must use math to figure it out which numbered jar is poisoned. You have to figure out which jars belonged on which shelf, and use elimination to see which jar is left.
I was able to eliminate most of the jars, and I guessed that jar 81 was the poisoned jar of candy. But when I looked at the solutions section, I was shocked by what it said. It said that one jar, number 16 to be exact, was the answer to two shelves. That’s simply not possible. Yet it said it right there.
In that section, the author claims the solution is another numbered jar, but she never once explained why jar 81, the one I had guessed, was not the answer. When I saw how messed up that puzzle was, I was furious. I had spent a long time, perhaps an hour or so, trying to figure out that mystery, only to find out that the whole solution to it was messed up in the end.
That really made me question if the author got an editor or if the editor actually paid attention when they edited the book. How could the author or the editor miss such an obvious mistake?
In the book, you are the detective’s assistant, but the detective is mostly unhelpful and, at one point, was even too drunk to be of much use. That’s kind of how I feel about the author. She wrote and illustrated clues that either weren’t very helpful or didn’t make any sense, and yet she expects readers to figure the mysteries out with grace.
The book is pretty, but in the end, that’s the best I can say about it. There are some mysteries in there that make more sense, but they are extremely few and perhaps even a bit too easy. Needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. There are simply too many mistakes inside it.
If there are any other mystery books that are better than the one I bought, you can mention them in the comment section. I would appreciate any suggestions for some good mystery-solving books.
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