A Most Puzzling Murder is a murder mystery novel with puzzles that the reader solves alongside the protagonist for clues to figure out whodunnit. Now, I love mystery novels and puzzles, so I was expecting to love this novel as well, but this novel is not it.

A Most Puzzling Murder is about a reclusive former child prodigy named Destiny Whip who does not know who her biological parents are. One day, Destiny receives a letter inviting her to an interview for the position of historian for the Scruffmore family.  Destiny has no idea who the Scruffmores are, and she never applied for the historian position, but she decides to travel to the Scruffmore castle on Eerie Island anyways because she might finally find out the truth about her own family.

It turns out the Scruffmores are a family of sorcerers, and this threw off the entire story for me because I was not expecting a heavy dose of magic with a murder mystery. I prefer to read murder mysteries that are grounded in realism. Anyways, the family patriarch, Mordecai Scruffmore, head sorcerer and a real dick, is murdered and Destiny is tasked with finding out who murdered him, with every other member of the Scruffmore family being a possible suspect as they each had a motive to kill him.

Besides my issue with the sorcerers and magic, A Most Puzzling Murder is full of trite characters, and the writing is a bit cringe. The puzzles do not even make this novel worth reading because there is absolutely no point to them. You do not have to solve the puzzles to continue with the story, and you do not miss anything if you choose not to do them. I also found the puzzles easy to solve (except for the math puzzles because my brain has a hard time comprehending numbers), so it is a peculiar choice on Marais’s part to make her protagonist a former child prodigy. I would have expected the puzzles to be much more difficult in that case. There are also a few choose-your-own-adventure type chapters that also serve no purpose because they do not change the outcome of the story at all.

I think a mystery novel with puzzles for the reader to solve is a fun idea, but this book is just too simplistic for me to enjoy.