Can You Solve The Murder? by Antony Johnston

In a word: no. Lol.

I’m usually quite good at solving mysteries because I’m good at two other things: understanding human behavior and understanding storytelling. Foreshadowing might as well be my hairdresser, as it generally tells me everything I need to know before it becomes common knowledge. That, I think, was a large part of why I had such a hard time trying to solve the murder in this book. The chopped up nature of the narrative — one that absolutely invests in obscurantism in order to amp up the challenge level and thus replayability of this volume — made it really easy for me to go haring down the wrong paths in pursuit of the answer.

That, however, was not the primary reason for my failure. And I had A LOT of failure. After spending about six hours on this book and getting seven bad endings, I had to admit defeat and look for the correct ending. The other books on my TBR pile won’t read themselves, after all! I wound up being genuinely surprised by the resolution, as all the signaling up till then had pointed in what I thought were very different directions.

Perhaps this was where my game construction knowledge hampered instead of helped me, as I kept playing under the assumption that I just hadn’t collected the right number of clues in the allotted time. Because this gamebook, unlike real life investigations, insists that you collect the right evidence before you encounter fixed waypoints. If you didn’t get the clues you needed in time, too bad: you lose and have to start all over again. As a completist who prefers to methodically gather all the information available before making a choice, I found this very exasperating.

But I should say more about the story itself before I continue. You, the reader, are a Detective Inspector with a new assistant. You’re called to the Elysium resort, a wellness center housed in an English manor, to investigate a rather spectacular murder. Harry Kennedy is a local businessman who plummeted from a second-storey balcony. The gardening fork in his chest might have had more to do with his death than the actual fall did tho. As you question guests and staff, you have to write down clue numbers and make choices that will lead you through non-consecutive sections and, hopefully, the correct ending.

It’s a bit like a grown-up Choose Your Own Adventure. I love a good gamebook (Jonathan Green, in particular, writes some excellent ones) but working through Can You Solve The Murder? felt less like my experience with those other books and more like playing the 999 video game, which I also found frustrating. And that’s totally a me thing: other people love the 999 game, and will likely adore this book as well. I’m just the kind of person who hates going back and doing roughly the same thing over and over again with only minor tweaks, in hopes of a better result. That’s not my idea of fun, tho I know a lot of people really enjoy doing exactly that. I also didn’t care for the idea that blowing this one investigation essentially means the end of your career as a detective, which was probably the least realistic part of this entire narrative, imo.

This is probably a great book for a certain kind of reader, but it was surprisingly not for me. Not being able to solve it was a bit of a blow to my ego, but I’m looking forward to redeeming myself with another mystery/puzzle game soon!

Can You Solve The Murder? by Antony Johnston was published July 1 2025 by Penguin Books and is available from all good booksellers, including