The Westing Game

Sixteen unlikely heirs, from a Polish immigrant dressmaker to a teenage bookie to a judge on the rise, are summoned to the newly opened Sunset Towers apartment building beside the isolated mansion of the reclusive millionaire Samuel W. Westing, who then promptly turns up dead. His will names all sixteen residents his heirs and pairs them off into teams, each given a set of cryptic clues and a chance at his two hundred million dollar fortune, on one condition: solve the mystery of who among them murdered him. As the teams dig into the clues and into each other's secrets, hidden identities and disguises pile up, culminating in the near fatal poisoning of Sandy McSouthers, the building's cheerful doorman, and mounting suspicion that falls first on Berthe Erica Crow, Westing's own embittered ex wife. It is Turtle Wexler, a sharp, prickly thirteen year old largely dismissed by the other heirs, who finally works out the game's real trick: Samuel Westing, the doorman Sandy McSouthers, the real estate agent who rented them their apartments, and a fourth identity, Julian Eastman, are all the very same man, alive the whole time and staging his own murder as an elaborate test. There was no murder to solve at all, only a puzzle Westing built to find someone clever and determined enough to inherit and run his company, and the book ends with Turtle, years later, having become exactly that heir.

Reading it is fast, funny, and packed with wordplay and misdirection meant to be solved alongside the characters rather than watched from a distance, and Raskin plants every clue fairly, which is why it rewards, and survives, rereading even after the trick is known. Readers who prefer not knowing where a mystery is headed should be warned the whole pleasure here depends on discovering the solution for themselves rather than reading it summarized first.