The Westing Game

Title: The Westing Game

Author: Ellen Raskin

Pages: 182

Genre: Mystery

Plot Summary:

A bizarre chain of events begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of Samuel W. Westing’s will. And though no one knows why the eccentric, game-loving millionaire has chosen a virtual stranger—and a possible murderer—to inherit his vast fortune, one thing’s for sure: Sam Westing may be dead … but that won’t stop him from playing one last game!

My Thoughts:

When I heard about the premise of this book: a millionaire found dead, a will for a $200 million estate with sixteen possible heirs, and no shortage of suspects as to who might have killed the millionaire. I was interested in giving this a read.

The book had a diverse cast, it was short and there is a lot of detail to pay attention to.

However, as a “Mystery” novel, I feel like this was a very flawed Mystery. As for one thing, there was no discussion about alibis. With alibis, I would be able to rule out a few of the 16 suspects (yes, there are 16 suspects in this novel!). And with everybody acting suspicious or having something to hide it made trying to figure out “whodunnit” almost impossible for me.

As I mentioned earlier there at 16 suspects in this novel. And I feel there were too many main characters to keep track of and the story (which was 182 pages) was just not long enough for me to really get to know these characters. I wasn’t too attached to any of the characters (I guess I did like Turtle and Judge J.J but I wasn’t too attached to them), and I’m a person who usually likes to find one character that I really like or am intrigued by when I’m reading a book. This did not happen with this book.

I was also really annoyed by the constant POV Changes in this book. Sometimes the POV changes twice in the same paragraph! There were a couple of times where I was asking myself: Who’s POV is this now? It constantly keeps changing and it was really annoying.

While I get that this was for children, this mystery just didn’t do it for me. If you are looking for a good mystery novel to read, I think you will do better looking elsewhere.

Rating: