The Revenge of the Robins Family

Bryan Hayter worked as a marketing and communications co-ordinator for a consulting engineering firm; he lived in Elora, Ontario.

The murder mystery has often been presented to its readers with more than just a story to satisfy its puzzle-loving followers. Eager to take the genre a step further, authors have introduced a wide variety of gimmicks in an attempt to capture a share of one of the largest segments of the book market.

More than cerebrally rewarding is this second book by Bill Adler and Thomas Chastain. A follow-up to the enormously successful first offering Who Killed the Robins Family?, this is a written puzzle with a $2,000 cash reward for the sleuth who ferrets out the culprits in not one but seven unsolved crimes in a mayhem-filled world odyssey of carnage. Actually, one witnesses eight crimes, but the authors have allowed the fictional investigator, Captain Waltham, to solve one killing — just to show how the authors’ minds work.

The narrative in the book serves merely to put meat on the bones of a complicated exercise in deduction. The story line follows the history begun in the original book about the Robins family. It takes the heirs and other assorted hangers-on into a new round of dark and deadly deeds focusing on a variety of motives. Those looking for a substantial read will be disappointed. This is no classical mystery with built-in ambience and characters rich in eccentricities. Rather, this is the whirlwind-tour variety, where the puzzle is all.

After all, the authors know that this book will serve as a road map of sorts. It will be pored over and analyzed. Its contents will be entered into home computers and the actions of each character in each scene will be scrutinized and cross-checked in the struggle to make sense of it all.

Those looking for a comfortable mystery of the familiar type are advised to look elsewhere on the shelf. But for those whose taste in detection runs to participatory gumshoeing, this is just the thing.

But be warned: this is the hardest $2,000 anyone will earn in a long while.