Customer Reviews

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey (Choose Your Own Adventure)

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This may in fact be the best of the entire "Choose Your Own Adventure" series, which is saying something, since this was always an interesting series, especially in its early days. Packard is the master of the genre, and the tangled web herein is suspenseful and atmospheric. Lots of fun for kids.

Choose Your Own Adventure books, I mean the Bantam Books ones, are the best! I want them all! It's amazing - the earlier ones are from around 1980 or even before, and can still be enjoyed thoroughly, as if they were written yesterday!

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey (Choose Your Own Adventure #9) by Edward Packard is about you, a young private investigator, being summoned by a wealthy plastics magnate who fears he's about to be murdered by his wife. After he falls dead at a small dinner engagement from drinking poisoned brandy it's up to you to find out who did it.

At first I was impressed by the lay-out of this book as there's very minimal jumping around but about halfway through the cracks began to show. The initial path I chose resulted in the narrator making deductions based on evidence I had never read. In fact my character solved the case bringing up evidence I had not read to explain situations (like characters being each others' alibi or character's accusing each other) I also hadn't read. The book solved itself. My initial choices managed to not even tell me when the poison was slipped into Thrombey's glass, which is the most important aspect of the case in figuring out the culprit. I wish this mystery had been laid out better, had let me solve it instead of doing it for me, and that there had been more suspects.

Another problem is after your initial reading there isn't much else here. If you're like me you enjoy exploring all of the possible avenues after the end of your first reading. But since neither the murderer nor the evidence changes and the mystery itself isn't very complex, there's very little to read other than finding out the same things in slightly different ways.

The art by Paul Granger is fine. It does it's job even if the narrator does indeed look like a 70's singer/game show host.

For me, this was the book that got me addicted at the age of 9! Edward Packard is a genius and one of my American heroes for inventing such an amazing literary genre! <i>Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?</i> is a great mystery, full of suspense and interesting character development. It also stands out from the early CYOA books because it only contains 14 endings, thus making for a longer story.

This book was also one of the few selected to be published as a Grey Castle Press hardcover!

This book is one of the worst books I have read. It is a mystery book where you are the detective but the book never really tells the solution to the mystery.No more comments.