Customer Reviews

Five-Minute Halloween Mysteries

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Like Weber's previous "The Mini Five-Minute Mysteries", this is in the tiny gift book format: the pages are 3 by 2.5 inches, so even though the cover is slightly larger than that, the book easily fits in a shirt pocket. However, the print is of normal size, so a story that would fit on 2 to 4 pages in a normal paperback takes 10 to 20 here. This means there are only 6 mini-mysteries, and makes it a bit harder to do a quick scan back and forth to try and put clues together.

The mysteries are typical of the genre - clues buried in descriptions of the locale, musings of the POV character (often a detective), etc., ending with some declaration by the protagonist and a question to the reader. In none of these cases is the challenge to solve a crime in the sense of determining the guilty party. Rather, the read just has to answer something like "How does detective X know the car was dented AFTER Friday?". The cases vary from ones in which once the key clue is spotted, everything quickly follows to ones that require additional reasoning that the reader may or may not find convincing after reading the book's solution. None of these is of the spot-the-silly-blunder type, with supposed ancient inscriptions including a B.C. date, or anything like that. One of the cases has a "spooky" theme in a general way, while the other five have an explicit tie-in to Halloween.

Overall, I'd expect most fans of mystery puzzles to enjoy this book. It's not what I'd consider an outstanding example of the genre. (I'm a big fan of the original puzzles of this type by Austin Ripley, despite how dated those are. E.g., Minute Mysteries) Unless the small size is an asset for some reason, I'd expect most people new to such puzzles would get more out of one of the ordinary-sized paperback collections by such authors as Weber, Ripley, Donald Sobol, Stanley Smith, Hy Conrad, and Jim Sukach, or bargain-priced hardback reprints.