Crime and Puzzlement

Rating:
Summary: Good fun for teenagers
Review: Lawrence Treat presents 23 (not 24 as the book's cover claims) pictures of crime scenes and invites the reader to solve the crimes. To aid the reader, Treat presents lists of questions that more often than not make the solution obvious. Still, the book represents an hour or two worth of mental exercise, and the reader is of course under no obligation to read the questions that may telegraph the solutions. For an inquisitive and mentally-active teenager, this book might be a great deal of fun. The most significant criticism of the book is that in a few cases, Treat relies on probabilities that are not close enough to certainties. In other words, at times the solution depends upon one or two educated guesses that could very well be wrong. However, as an exercise in deductive thinking, reading the book should provide a young adult with an afternoon well spent. (The twenty-fourth puzzle is not a crime to be solved but instead a pair of pictures in which the reader is to find the differences between the two.)

Rating:
Summary: Good fun for teenagers
Review: Lawrence Treat presents 23 (not 24 as the book's cover claims) pictures of crime scenes and invites the reader to solve the crimes. To aid the reader, Treat presents lists of questions that more often than not make the solution obvious. Still, the book represents an hour or two worth of mental exercise, and the reader is of course under no obligation to read the questions that may telegraph the solutions. For an inquisitive and mentally-active teenager, this book might be a great deal of fun. The most significant criticism of the book is that in a few cases, Treat relies on probabilities that are not close enough to certainties. In other words, at times the solution depends upon one or two educated guesses that could very well be wrong. However, as an exercise in deductive thinking, reading the book should provide a young adult with an afternoon well spent. (The twenty-fourth puzzle is not a crime to be solved but instead a pair of pictures in which the reader is to find the differences between the two.)