Crime and Puzzlement 2: More Solve-Them-Yourself Picture Mysteries

Great book. Not like the others. You have to use your reasoning and observation skills to solve these mysteries!

The Crime & Puzzlement series is a winning combination of novel and puzzle. Each installment offers twenty-four illustrated crime scenarios the reader is challenged to solve, sketched by introductions with enough wit and narrative talent to breathe life into the characters and engage the imagination in what other hands would be an impossibly limited space. It's an accomplished, compact take on the mystery, and the series deserves attention from devotees of the genre and fans of brainteasers alike. Consider this an endorsement for both the series and this volume. Excuse me, then, while I explore the differences between this first sequel and the original. A fellow reviewer indicted the original Crime & Puzzlement for being too easy, seemingly geared for a teen audience. I did not agree. I do not think, however, that he would find the same fault in the sequel, which is a good deal tougher. Care has been taken to include a good mix of challenge - we still have a couple puzzles that rest on things like handedness or follow-the-footsteps, but we also have a number of conundrums that really require you to think like a culprit or witness to uncover inconsistencies with the evidence that are otherwise not at all apparent. We have stuff like "Say It with Flowers", where one must forage a thicket of clues to piece together the previous presence and actions of an unknown party. We have puzzles like "Stretcher Case", simple if you know for what to look, but providing a neat "a-ha" moment if you initially don't. Included also is the deftness of "Tear It", which seems ridiculously simple until it completely blindsides you. In a devious twist, for a couple cases, the Socratic series of questions that usually leads you to the solution actually serves to distract you from a crucial flaw in the case's premise. This second time around, author Lawrence Treat feels comfortable in playing with the medium he pioneered and upping the deductive ante. For some puzzles, though, the challenge is a bit artificial. Are you familiar with the term "crosswordese", used to denounce crossword clues reliant on previous knowledge of unreasonably obscure facts rather than wordplay or logic? We have too much crosswordese here. At twenty-nine years old, I cannot list the distinguishing characterstics of a bean leaf or blossom or venture how an arsonist would gauge the prevailing wind to determine where to set his blaze. While this isn't a children's series, it does appeal to a wide age range, and basing several entire solutions on such unintuitive facts rather than deduction limits the potential audience. There were also a couple cases where I disagreed with the solutions (regarding "The Custer Dinette": how did she know he was *poisoned*, and how is that less indicting than what the book presents as the clincher?) or where the evidence and conclusions seemed a bit tenuous. (For example, it seems naive to insist that drug-addled criminals would never considerin

I have always loved mysteries, and this book allows you to be the supersleuth. To solve these short mysteries you look at the picture of the scene of the crime and answer questions to figure out the culprit. I LOVED THIS BOOK!