R: Raskin

Ellen Raskin was an illustrator of children's books and wrote the 1979 Newbery Medal winner, The Westing Game which I reviewed recently. Her manuscripts for this closed-room mystery are at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This post is part of the Crime Fiction Alphabet 2012 at Mysteries in Paradise.  My last posting in this project was several letters ago, but I am trying to get back on track so have jumped in with the current week's letter.

Review: The Westing Game

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this as part of a Crime Read Along and am really glad I did. It came out in 1978 and won a Newbery Medal, but somehow I had never come across it before. It is more of a puzzle than a mystery in some ways, but it includes several crimes along the way, including several apparent murders.

The basic idea is that a group of people are brought to live in an apartment building with a view of the Westing mansion. Mr. Westing dies and the people are summoned to the reading of the will where a puzzle is set before them that must be solved to get their inheritance. The puzzle is who killed Mr. Westing and the people are paired off (in apparently mis-matched pairs) and given words on slips of paper towel as clues. The final solution to the puzzle is clever, but solve-able if the reader is paying attention.

The characters in the novel were appealing and the various twists and turns of the story kept things moving. The end of the book takes you several years into the future so you get to see how things turn out for the characters which was good.