What a clever little puzzle box of a mystery! I admit I picked the identity of Crow very early on, but the rest was a surprise. The mystery isn't really the point here, though. It's more the brief interactions of the sixteen different characters, and how being forced to take part in a mystery alters their lives. It's on that point that I'm of two minds, however. This edition is - wait, I'm checking - 225 pages. With the best will in the world, a 225 page book with sixteen different protagonists can do very little than sketch in characterisation, and given that characterisation is something I enjoy, it often felt very thin to me. That being said, those sketches were extremely well done, and Raskin managed to include more character information in them than I would have thought possible, but still. I don't say this often, but I wonder if a bigger page count might have helped.

I wonder, too, if I would have liked this book if I'd read it as a child. I'm not altogether sure that I would have, which to me seems an argument, if nothing else, for continuing to read children's books as an adult. You can appreciate more then.