alchemy 's review for:

A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais

1.5

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Being a lover of puzzles, riddles, and encoded messages, I was excited to pre-order this. It turned out to be an interesting concept with shoddy execution.

The characterizations were a bit overwrought and not particularly grounded. Everyone had some absurd name—aside from the main character Destiny, there's also a pair of twins named Minx and Angel, people named Hexabus and Dominus, and so on. 

The puzzles themselves were fairly rudimentary. One was a cipher where each letter was transposed with the one following it in the alphabet. One wasn't a cipher at all, just words where the letters had been scrambled at random. More importantly, most of the puzzles weren't integrated into the story very well and felt tacked on as an afterthought.

Ultimately, the quality of the writing is what made this such a disappointing read. At one point, instead of demonstrating a character's personality through their actions, that character is described as having a "Mean Girls vibe." (This is in the narration itself, not in another character's speech or thoughts!) It felt amateurish and it read like fanfiction.

Also, the well-trodden 'magical ability as allegory for disability or chronic illness' trope was handled clumsily here. The narration basically turned directly to the audience each time to explicitly spell out the symbolism that was just employed, rather than trusting us to pick up on it.

This book isn't abject garbage or anything, but I expected it to be quite good, and I was let down.