Customer Reviews

Great Book Of Whodunit Puzzles: Mini-Mysteries For You To Solve

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The "Great Book of Whodunit Puzzles" by Falcon Travis contains 43 mini-mysteries, usually one or two pages long. Several of the puzzles have clues that can be found in a clue section right after the puzzles. The detailed answers are in the back of the book. There are a wide variety of puzzles in the book. Some of them are traditional mini-mysteries where you read the mystery and use the clues to solve it; some are logic puzzles where you have to figure out who is who using the clues in the puzzle; some are picture puzzles where you have to compare two pictures and figure out which one is a fake; cryptograms; and picture puzzles where the pictures are mixed up and you have to figure out the correct sequence.

For the most part the "Great Book of Whodunit Puzzles" is very challenging. You need to read the puzzles carefully and also pay close attention to the illustration in each puzzle. The clues that are included are very useful to the puzzles. Falcon Travis uses a lot of punny names in the book such as Sergeant Hans Zupp, Inspector Will Ketchum and Inspector Donna DiAnsa but he doesn't use names that give away the answers. My favorite puzzles were the straightforward mini-mysteries and picture puzzles. However, the majority of the puzzles were the logic type, which often involved figuring out who was who rather than finding out whodunit. Also, a couple of the puzzles, "Murder in the Locked Room" and "The Clickspring Cup", were a bit unbelievable. But the other 41 puzzles in the book were well done.

Fans of mini-mysteries and especially logic problems will enjoy this book.

A 9-yr old and I do 2-3 of these puzzles a day and he is the one asking to do them. I think he could only do a few of them completely independently, but a lot of the fun is in working together anyway. The previous reviewer gives a good description of the book. Just knowing you can consult the clues section for help and still find the final answer on your own, tends to make us work harder to find those clues in the original problem ourselves. In addition, framing it as detective work to get the bad guys makes it much more interesting to us than if the same problems were in a math or logic book.