If you love Clue and Knives Out then you would love this book. A remote Island, rich family drama, and a murder mystery. Destiny is a child prodigy dealing with her own personal tragedies. The book is definitely a "choose your own adventure" book and there are puzzles throughout the book. I felt kinda dumb so I would definitely get a notebook to write stuff down. The answers are in the back so I would try before checking. I would definitely take your time to read the book and work on the puzzles. I had the ebook so I don't how the puzzles will work if you have the audiobook. The mystery was very good and kept me guessing throughout the book. I received an arc from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais was such a delightful surprise. It’s quirky, clever, and packed with charm. The locked-room mystery kept me totally hooked, and I loved that there were actual riddles and puzzles woven into the story for the reader to solve along the way. It made the whole experience feel interactive and super fun. The humor was spot on, the characters were unique and memorable, and the mystery itself was satisfyingly twisty. If you're looking for something lighthearted but still smart and engaging, this one’s a must-read.

Destiny Whip has genius-level brains – she also has some heavy grief and questions about who her parents are. When an invitation to apply for a historian position on a mysterious island appears with allusions to discovering her parentage, Destiny can’t resist accepting the interview.

When Destiny gets to the island, she encounters various members of the royal Scruffmore family she’s employment from. Could the patriarch be her father? As Destiny wanders the castle, she stumbles upon an old and complicated mystery. To uncover the Scruffmore secrets, Destiny will have to solve various puzzles, trust in her visions, and use her instincts of who can be trusted.

This book had a lot of great things going on – there were “choose your own adventure” elements, puzzles for the reader to solve, a varied cast of characters, and a well-written mystery. The puzzles throughout were really fun for me! The story was told from multiple viewpoints, but I thought the characters were distinct enough to be able to easily distinguish who was speaking/where they fit into the story. Add in the fact that there was a magical element and this was a great book! Fun, interactive, unique, and smart – perfect for puzzle lovers and amateur sleuths!

thank you netgalley for an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

there were a lot of things to love about this book and story and a couple of things that kept it from being a 5 star read.

first and foremost: i loved that it was part riddles, part "choose your story", part "Clue" game, part magical, and part murder mystery. we have our main character, destiny, invited to the scruffmore castle to interview for a position she never submitted an application for. within the letter there's a riddle for destiny to solve, and from there the story begins. i WAS able to solve some of the riddles on my own, having it in ebook made it a little more difficult but definitely not impossible.

i can't say too much about destiny without spoilers, but she is my favorite part of the book. i'd read more stories if for some reason there were spin off books and she was in them. she is so smart and wise beyond her years. the poor girl is just drowning in her own grief and reaching for a life line :( this book touched on grief and emotions way more than i was expecting it to and it was a pleasant surprise.

while i PERSONALLY loved how much was going on in the book i can see why people wouldn't. there are several important plots, characters, and POVs and it can get to be a lot to try to keep up with. for me i loved hopping from pov to pov.

overall the story wrapped up very nicely, with everyone getting the ending they deserved. the first 25% of the book was so so so slow and the aspect of magic was kind of just thrown in there. i do wish we would've gotten more information on the family and their background/magical origins instead of the first quarter of the book being destiny making her way to the castle. but i loved the main character and how all of the stories came together in the end.

i'd recommend for anyone who loves trying to figure out mysteries :)

I picked this book up thinking was a fairly typical mystery, a bit of locked room, lots of tension between family members, and the brilliant outsider managing to solve everything. It was - but with a bit of fantasy / paranormal tossed in with magic and ghosts.

Destiny Whip is a 21 year old child prodigy a gifted enigmatologist (one who solves puzzles). Her life has been full of tragedy and loss including losing her family twice which has caused her to be a depressed recluse and not having left her apartment in a year. Further deepening her depression is the fact she has prophetic dreams; she dreamed of her family’s death but couldn’t prevent it. Her life takes a drastic change, however, when she receives a letter inviting her to interview as one of the finalists for the position of librarian for the Scruffimore family. Not only did she not apply for the position, but there’s also a code embedded in the letter, telling her a secret about her family - her birth family! - will be revealed. She’s never been able to trace anything about them, no record of her birth, no adoption record, so she’s off running to catch the ferry to the mysterious island.

There she meets the Scruffmore family, a family of secrets and magic - literally magic. The job of the librarian is to search through the family vaults, looking for lost secrets and spells. But before she even gets to meet Mordicai Scruffmore, the head of the family and her potential new employer, there’s a death, one she’s dreamed about and was trying to prevent. Destiny is left figuring secrets, solving puzzles, and discovering who’s the killer before it’s too late.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The plot was amazing! Lots of twists and turns, not knowing who was an ally for Destiny, who was an enemy. It was very atmospheric, mostly set in a crumbling castle with no electricity, no cell service, and lots of gloomy overcast skies. The part I didn’t like was the stylistic elements, starting with the use of present tense. I don’t like it in general, and here it felt like it kept slapping me in the face as soon as I started to get into the book. There were some ‘chose your own adventure’ chapters which used second person; the choices didn’t seem to make a difference in the story, just made confusing. Likewise the puzzles were disruptive; while I love the idea of having puzzles for the reader to figure out along with Destiny, there was little reward for working them. They were also challenging to do in an ebook format. The author did mention a webpage where the reader could download a booklet of the puzzles. I did do several puzzles just using the booklet before I started the book, but once I started reading, I was too interested in what was behind that locked door to take a few minutes to either check the booklet or flip through the ebook to solve it. And ultimately, as I said, there was little reason for the reader to do them.

Overall, entertaining but it could have been so much better, so much easier to read, without some of the stylistic decisions the author made.

Recommended - the story was awesome, even if it was challenging in places to read. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley.com that I voluntarily reviewed.

If you like escape rooms and Murdle puzzles, you must READ THIS BOOK IMMEDIATELY!!! Omg I read this book in one sitting because the twisty, unique, choose-your-own-murder method of storytelling had me completely hooked and I HAD to know who the murderer was....and I still guessed wrong!! But in the really fun, kicking your feet, holy crap they fooled me kind of way. I love love a good murder mystery and this was SO MUCH FUN. Highly recommend!!

THIS IS LITERALLY PERFECT and it feels like it was written precisely for my brain and taste. At it's most basic level - this is a Knives Out, Agatha Christie style murder mystery with incredibly complicated twists and turns. On top of that, there are puzzles that you as the reader solve to get deeper into the story and can even get access to additional excerpts to inform the story. As a major puzzle lover, this was brilliantly done. Each puzzle presented a challenge, but wasn't so difficult that I couldn't move forward.

If you love working your brain to put together magic puzzles - you should order this immediately.

Everything that Bianca Marais writes is perfection. A single author cannot often deliver great literary fiction, a cozy mystery, and a genre-busting choose-your-own-adventure book. As a matter of fact, I know of no other author who has come close!

WARNING: it's yet another unpopular opinion!!

Right... I definitely didn't expect this to happen when I started reading A Most Puzzling Murder. I absolutely loved the sound of the blurb with the promise of an interactive plot, puzzles and riddles to tackle and a murder to solve that hasn't even happened yet... I fully expected to love my time with this book and part of me still isn't sure what exactly happened, but the fact is I ended up struggling so much with this book that I decided to make the difficult decision to DNF. I'll try to explain why I had to resort to such drastic measures below.

First of all I have to stress that part of the problem most likely is an 'it's not you, it's me' issue. My reading mood has been particularly fickle lately, and this might just not have been the right time for me to tackle A Most Puzzling Murder. I mean, the concept is incredibly unique and I loved that the story had actual puzzles and riddles to solve along the way. It's definitely something that makes the story stand out, although I do have to say that it's important to get a physical copy as having to deal with them on my kindle wasn't easy (small font, awkward to go back and forth in the text and complicated to take notes).

I can appreciate everything the author is trying to accomplish with this book, and I can't deny that it's a story that you don't see every day. Unfortunately, I personally feel that A Most Puzzling Murder was trying to do way too much, cramming so many different elements into the pages that it became a chore to keep them all apart. I liked the idea of trying to figure out the mystery along with Destiny. The puzzles itself were great, although I probably would have appreciated them even more with a physical copy. Then it got really weird, and the story started to lose me pretty quickly...

I know this is all my own fault, but I somehow hadn't realized that A Most Puzzling Murder was part fantasy. I think I was distracted by the promise of the riddles and interactive plot, but the whole magic element kind of blindsided me. Fantasy isn't really a genre I read much anymore, so to be suddenly confronted by the whole ancient royal family with magic element wasn't really on my bingo card. Especially since the workings of that magic aren't really explained either... I also wasn't a fan of Destiny to be honest, and the ghost best friend was just awkward.

I also struggled considerably with the multiple POV structure. There were SO many different POVs in play, and this made it very hard to make proper sense of it all. To make things worse, I can't say that I liked any of them, and it's mainly a lot of family drama, sneaking around and hinting at secrets in the part I did read. Not my cup of tea, and not what I expected either. I did initially like the idea of the choose-your-own-adventure element, but as soon as I realized that your choices don't have any impact on the plot whatsoever that magic of that element was lost as well.

I really dislike DNFing and I tried to continue reading multiple times, but after one too many time catching myself starting to skimread and still 300 pages left to read, I decided it was best to throw in the towel instead. After all, it was already very much clear that A Most Puzzling Murder and me were never going to get along... If you are looking for something unique and don't mind a challenge, don't give up on my account though; just make sure to get a physical copy if you do decide to read it.

This book sounded interesting, I requested it, but it sat on my “TBR” for a while. I’m glad I finally started it, and here we are. First off, this is a complex and interesting book. Some places really remind me of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books from when I was a lot younger. That was really fun! It was also great to try and figure out the puzzles along side Destiny. There was just so much to love about this book, but there were also a couple of things to not love about this book. They aren’t really major, but there was just so much, it was hard to keep track of: characters, their motivations, their movements, who’s their father, and a few other things. I just felt a little overwhelmed at a few points, and I had to backtrack to figure out what was going on because I lost the thread a little. However, this is a fun and interesting book, and it would be intriguing if there was another. Recommend. I was provided a complimentary copy which I voluntarily reviewed.

A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais is a brilliantly crafted mystery that hooks you from the first page. Destiny Whip, a reclusive enigmatologist, is thrust into the unsettling world of the secretive Scruffmore family on a stormy island, tasked with uncovering hidden truths—and preventing a murder she’s foreseen. Filled with cryptic puzzles, eerie secrets, and a richly atmospheric setting, this novel uniquely invites readers to solve riddles alongside the protagonist. The tension builds expertly as time runs out, making it a must-read for fans of immersive, mind-bending mysteries with a supernatural twist.

I really was exciting for this concept. It is very ineractive and the answers are in the back of the book. However, I would have preferred this as a physical book because many of the pictures needed to solve the puzzles were hard to see or expand. Mystery was fun but challenging to get the clues to solve.

One of the most uniquely puzzling books I’ve ever puzzled together 😉 . If anything should have a clue to this family mystery then it’s the little snippets of guessing that lead you down different paths (or chapters), till you find yourself at another conundrum of secrets.

I don’t know how she did it but I am so impressed by the authors ability to write this unique book. I could barely keep it on track so don’t know how the heck the author did… she must have had about 500 sticky notes around her at all times.
And I was just trying to keep it all on track.

Think magic, hexes, child prodigy, riddles, families, loss, cats and a whole of a lotta clues that pull it together

For me, it was a mix of emotions. If I have to rate it for NetGalley, I would say the writing is 5, the creativeness is a 5. But the storyline was not my fav. So more towards a 3. I think I’ll settle on a 3.75 ⭐️

I feel bad and I have already seen a lot of positive reviews so ignore mine… it was just a bit too confusing or interactive for me. And if you’re new to the author, and you don’t love this, then you must find her backlist because her other books are 👌🏻

Destiny Whip hasn't left her apartment in a year. When she get an interview for a job she didn't apply for and they claim to know all about her family she sets off directly. She follows the directions and finds herself on Eerie Island which is exactly as described. What started as a hidden message on the invitation quickly turns into puzzles to solve throughout the island and a mystery that Destiny wasnt even expecting.

I loved this book!!! It was a mystery in a fantasy setting with puzzles to solve throughout the book. The puzzles helped to give clues to solve the mystery. I honestly had so much fun! My only issue is that I had it on my kindle. I wish I'd had a hard copy so I could work out the clues on the page. The story was well thought out and gripping, it's easy to overcomplicate these kind of stories but this was just right.

For a book titled “A Most Puzzling Murder,” this really delivers on odd puzzles, codes, and choose-your-own-conundrums. The murder doesn’t appear until midway, but until then we get to know an intelligent, charming character named Destiny Whip.

Destiny, an orphaned child prodigy, now 21, a member Council of Enigmatologists, has been invited to be the family historian for the Scruffmores — although an embedded message in the invite suggests there’s more to that — perhaps the secret of her own unknown parentage. Arriving at Eerie Island, she meets the Scruffmore family — who consider themselves royalty (only 33 magical bloodlines are left!) and are all undergoing massive relationship traumas as Mordecai/Morty, the leader and “Sorcerer King” is playing games while naming a successor (or a victim — it’s not clear why he feels he needs to kill off the next in line). Most of his children want an inheritance (including Destiny, with a meekest hope she’s some kind of discarded illegitimate child). Then Destiny is mostly a secret witness to a chaotic family meeting until suddenly she’s part of it.

The book is a tad long, but it works as a mystery set within a magical family. There are sigils and talismans that require revelations, and a very knowledgeable raccoon roaming the secret passageways. I felt this was more of a young adult book and I think that audience will also be charmed by Destiny. 4 stars!

BTW, Yay for having the puzzle answers hyperlinked at the back of the book!

Literary Pet Peeve Checklist:
Green Eyes (only 2% of the real world, yet it seems like 90% of all fictional females): YES Tempest has moss-colored eyes; Newton has algae-colored eyes; but Destiny has one amber eye and one blue eye.
Horticultural Faux Pas (plants out of season or growing zones, like daffodils in autumn or bougainvillea in Alaska): NO Magical island with magical weather — who knows what artificially grows there.

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy!

This story was interesting and there were a couple of surprises, but I would have enjoyed it much more in physical book form. The ebook version was tedious. Flipping back and forth to the answer to each puzzle would be easy in a physical copy. In ebook form, you have to hope you remember to place a bookmark so that you can go back to the same page rather than flip around, trying to find your place. I was really looking forward to the puzzles, but they became a bit annoying. The images were a bit hard to read for some of the puzzles and the size/format of the images couldn't be adjusted. I think it would be fun to read in any other form, especially if you like puzzles and wordplay.

4.5/5

Get your pen and paper!
This book was so much fun! All of the interactive aspects were entertaining and solving the puzzles was quite satisfying.

The story follows Destiny, a code-cracking genius who gets a mysterious invitation to Eerie Island, to interview for the role of historian of the Scruffmore family. Hoping that this opportunity will help her figure out who her biological parents are, she embarks on this adventure and finds herself embroiled in an intense familial fight for power.

Every single detail of the story is a clue, written in a way that compels your brain to make incorrect assumptions, misleading you incessantly. It is impossible to guess every twist and turn that the plot takes, but I still had a lot of fun trying to figure out the various plot points!

There were so many pieces to the puzzle that a reread would probably be quite enjoyable. I would love to try to spot all the clues that I didn’t notice the first time.

Some chapters allow the reader to make a choice, which was an interesting way to demonstrate how actions can have unintended consequences, but you can only do your best with the information that is available to you.

The characters were less thoroughly fleshed-out than what I typically enjoy, and fit into certain stereotypes, but considering the build of this book, it wasn’t unexpected. They were still quite interesting, only the focus is geared more towards the mystery than towards character work.

What a fun read! Murder mystery, a splash of choose your own adventure, puzzles!

Super interactive book with a great plot.


Only think that would have made this better is if I had a physical copy and could have flipped bad and forth easier.

Well, this book was a pleasant surprise. I don’t come across too many murder mysteries that offer puzzles and games for the readers themselves to solve. But this novel offers just that.

In this story, we meet Destiny Whip-former child prodigy and genius, who also suffers from crippling self-doubt, and loathing. She cannot let go of what she believes is her fault, and she cannot move forward. The only one keeping her relatively sane is her best friend, Bex-who happens to be a ghost.

As the author leads us on the journey to the Scuffmores home, and how Destiny even became aware of them in the first place, we find ourselves stepping into Destiny’s shoes, and solving riddles and clues along the way-making the book way more fun and interactive. We also get to see just how smart Destiny is-as she easily sees patterns, observes behaviors and deceptions, and figures out why she’s really there.

Bianca not only took Destiny on a seemingly straightforward murder case, and did the ol’ switcheroo, but she also did that to the reader. I definitely thought I had the plot all figured out-only to find out I was completely wrong more than once. I love when I find out the mystery wasn’t as easy to solve as I thought it would be. But unlike myself, Destiny put all the puzzles pieces together at the end, as well as finding healing and closure for past pain.

I had a good time diving into this one, and it gave me Sherlock Holmesesque vibes. If you a fan of mysteries, and solving riddles, check this one out. 4.25 stars

Destiny Whip, an enigmatologist who has not left her house in a year, receives a mysterious job offer to be the Scruffmore family historian, a job she did not apply for. Try as she might, she can find no information about the family, but the invitation is a hidden message that promises to reveal family secrets. The best part? You, as the reader, get to help solve the clues.

Destiny is enticed by the idea of learning more about herself and follows the clues to Eerie Island. When she arrives, she discovers why the Island has the name "Eerie" and finds hidden messages, a looming murder, and a magical royal family. As her visions reveal a death that hasn’t happened, she must race to solve the mystery before it’s too late.

There is a crazy group of Scruffmore family members who all seem to have a motive for murder. She is not sure if she can trust any of them, but once she is on the island, it does not appear that there is a way off!

Why Jackie loves it

I love a great puzzle, and this book not only has that, but it also allows you to interact with Destiny via email if you need help solving the clues. I did this for the fun of the interaction! There is also some choose-your-own-adventure in the story. This is the most fun I have had reading a book in ages. I added sticky notes in the pages because, even though Marais encourages you to mark within the pages, I could not bring myself to do it. If you are reading digitally, there is a printable to help you work out the puzzles!