"Where There's a Will" by Rex Stout

I had zero idea about who was the murderer here until the last chapter or so, and then my idea was wrong. But for all that, it made perfect sense once Nero Wolfe did The Reveal!

Basically, a rich dude died and left a will. Except it makes no sense (no, not like in The Westing Game); the beneficiaries hire Nero Wolfe to figure out what on Earth the rich dude was thinking.

And then somebody dies. (Not spoiler tagging that it because, y'know, this is a murder mystery, so it's kind of obvious that there'll be a murder.) Actually, the murder |isn't discovered to be a murder until like halfway through the book|.

 

So anyway, I'm not going to bother detailing the plot more. Instead, I'll tell you what I thought of it! (That is the point of book reviews, after all.)

 

I liked it. As I said, the murderer was good enough to keep my suspicion off them, and the good guys figured it out. And, crucially, you could (probably; I didn't actually go back through and check) have put together the information you were given and discovered the murderer yourself. If you can't do that, the author's doing something wrong.

 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for non-graphic violence (as in, muuuuuuuurder) and some bad language. It would probably make a relatively fun videogame.

 

As you should probably expect by now, I rate this 4 stars. 

(Endnote: Someone's selling this edition of this book for like 70 dollars on ebay. I'm pretty sure we got this at a used bookstore for far less than that.)