Sam Westing leaves a puzzle in his will, and any of the heirs who can solve the riddle will win the entire inheritance. The puzzle is, who murdered Sam Westing? The heirs are broken up into teams and given different clues, but only by working together can they solve the mystery.

I remember liking this a lot more when I was a kid. Rereading it as an adult, it just didn't have the same charm. I still enjoyed the mystery and the riddles, but the characters got on my nerves. They are all really odd people, selfish and rude.

The writing style got on my nerves a little too, because it is so disjointed. It jumps really quickly between scenes without even explaining who is in the new scene or where they are. You have to figure out who is speaking and to whom as you go along. This means I had to frequently go back and reread a previous paragraph after finally getting to the pertinent information, realizing who was actually speaking to whom, and then reread it to make sense of what had gone before. Why can't the writing just delineate who is where?

I do love the puzzles and riddles though. The main puzzle is pretty obvious from the beginning because the reader gets to see all the clues that the characters have, whereas the characters only have a small portion of clues. However, there are a lot of other mysteries going on underneath everything else that were fun to think through.

I still enjoyed it, but I guess it just didn't live up to my memory of it.