The Most Unladylike Puzzle Book by Robin Stevens

Hello, Detectives! Daisy Wells here. I’m here to teach you about the most important part of being a detective: using logic to solve a case.

Go into a mystery without an understanding of logic and you’ll simply flail about desperately. The criminal will escape, the mystery will never be solved and you will be absolutely no sort of detective at all. Hazel and I have certainly come across so-called detectives who don’t know how to use logic properly. There was our case on the Orient Express, for example, and then the one in Cambridge. It was just a good thing the Detective Society was there to save the day!

Now to explain (because Hazel is saying I have to): to solve a logic puzzle, you need to consider what you know about the facts in the case.

Say one suspect tells you that they were in the kitchen when the murder happened, and another suspect backs them up. That means that neither of those people were in the garden (or any other room), so any solution that involves them being in another room must be false. Similarly, if a victim tells you that their assailant had red hair, and you find red hairs on their clothes, you must rule out all dark-haired people from the suspect list.

In this chapter I’m going to teach you the basics of logic, and how to use it to solve cases. One of the most important tricks I’ve learned is that grids can be extremely helpful. You can draw one out and use it to note down the things you do know, all together – once you see the facts like that, you can begin to work out what else can’t be true and what can!

Jam packed with over 100 puzzles, The Most Unladylike Puzzle Book is the perfect gift for budding detectives everywhere, and features beloved characters from Robin Stevens’ best selling series, Murder Most Unladylike and The Ministry of Unladylike Activity. You can pick up your own copy, and also download a puzzle sheet to have a go at even more of the puzzles right now, by clicking below!