The Mystery Agency: The Bookshop Murder Review

The Mystery Agency: The Bookshop Murder

WBG Score: 9

Player Count: 1+

You’ll like this if you like: The previous mystery agency book. Any of the mystery agency games. Puzzles and playing detective. 

Published by: The Mystery Agency Ltd

Designed by: Henry Lewis

This is the reviewer’s copy. See our review policy here

By Steve Godfrey

This is your obligatory ‘NO SPOILERS’ warning. I’ll try my best to not spoil any clues / puzzles in the pictures but if you are worried about that then quickly scroll past the pics. 

If you want to read my review of the of the Museum Heist, the first book in this series then head here

If you’ve played the previous book, then feel free to skip this ‘how it works’ section as it works the same. If not, then prepare yourself for this expertly written explanation on…

How to solve a bookshop murder. 

First, grab yourself your writing implement of choice and some paper. No more than that... maybe just a touch more… perfect. The first few pages will contain suspect sheets, a homicide report, and a map of the street. You can either write on them in the book or you can scan the QR code and download the printable versions. I prefer the latter in case someone wants to borrow the book or for me later on when I’ve forgotten enough of it to play again… so about two weeks if I’m being generous. Then away you go. Most of the pages and spreads in this book will have some form of puzzle on them. Simply read through the story, observe the pictures. Then solve the puzzle and go to the next page. At certain points, you’ll come across locked door puzzles. Once you’ve solved these, you’ll need to scan the QR code on the page that’ll take you to a web page where you can enter the code once you’ve solved it. This will tell you if you're successful or not. If so, go to the next page. The back of the book will have a hints section that will give you two hints per puzzle. Then there’s a solution section. No prizes for guessing what that does. 

A paragraph about a QR code!

This is going to feel like a trivial point to some, but for me, it made me happy. Plus, it’s at the start of the book, so it makes sense to talk about it at the start of the review. If you wanted to print the suspect pages in the first book, you’d either have to scan them or take a photo and then try and print it that way. It wasn’t the biggest inconvenience, but it wasn’t quick either, so it wasn’t ideal, especially when you just want to get into the game. In this one, they have a handy QR code where you can easily print off the suspect sheets and map with no fuss. It’s such a small quality of life improvement, but it meant I could get going on the book that much quicker. So thank you for that change. Just to say that the lack of QR code was in my printing of the first book. I don’t know if that’s changed for newer printings. 

The difficult second album?

Last year's book was always going to be a tough act to follow for me. I gave it a 9.5 out of ten, and it was number three in my top ten games of last year. So has it lived up to last year's lofty heights? I won’t bury the lead. Yes, yes it has. 

Tales of the unexpected 

One of the genius parts of the first book was the setting and how it was used as a basis for the puzzles. You see, being set in a museum, you had access to all sorts of different settings and time periods, and the book could play about with those and make clever use of them, and they still made sense for the story. You could have a puzzle that used hieroglyphics and one that had medieval knights, and it wouldn’t feel out of place. So when I originally saw that a bookshop (or in this case shops plural) was the setting, I assumed that it would be much the same and would go about using different books or book settings as the backdrop for the puzzles. Much like Jasper Fforde does with his Thursday Next novels, I thought we’d be in a world that bounced us through classic and modern literature, and we are, for a bit. The book instead does something that I didn't expect and focuses more on the themes of each of the shops. Each shop, and not all of them are bookshops, has a different theme, and each shop and the proprietor are used in really clever ways that keep the variability of the last book intact here. It’s safe to say that my expectations weren’t met here, but that’s not a bad thing. In fact, far from it. It just goes as proof that these books aren’t going to rest on their laurels and follow the same path from book to book. 

The puzzles here are just as fun as its predecessor, and there's an interesting variety of difficulty and type of puzzle. Of course, the difficulty is subjective, and puzzles where I found it difficult to work out the mechanisms, you might instantly get and vice versa. But variety is the name of the game, and one minute you’ll be trying to decode like you're at Bletchley Park, and next you’ll be having flashbacks to GCSE maths. If any of that worries you, it shouldn’t because even me with my poor maths skills managed to work out the more mathy of the puzzles. 

The major thing I loved from the last book that’s carried over here is the mix of puzzles and detective work. You'll have individual puzzles on pretty much every double-page spread coupled with story elements and pictures. The puzzle solutions present their own clues to the culprit, but that won't be enough. You'll need to rely on your detective skills and information gathering to figure out the case (hence the amount of paper you'll need). Yes, here you'll need to channel your inner Benoit Blanc, or Jessica Fletcher, or whatever the name of the current detective on Death in Paradise is when you're reading this. It's these elements that immerse you in the story and ultimately keep everything from feeling like “just a set of puzzles” that you can find in any old puzzle book. I rarely felt like I solved a puzzle that was pointless to the investigation. If I did, I was proved wrong at a later point in the story. When that did happen, I had images of Henry Lewis sat at home in his armchair by a roaring fire and looking up from his book and saying “hah, got him.”

One of my assumptions was that, given my experience from the first book, I’d have some decent foreknowledge of what to expect from this one. I’d know what to look out for, what to keep an eye on, what sort of things could help me solve the case. I wrote down loads more for this one, and I thought that I’d covered enough ground and enough clues to help me solve it. And so it came to the big denouement, and all I could think was, “I know your game, Henry, I’ve got this”... turns out I didn't know his game, and I certainly didn't have this. Now, while at the time I didn't feel quite as clever as I did before the big reveal, it did lead me to a few conclusions. The devil is in the details. I’d managed to get quite a few of the bigger plot points, and I’d managed to hone in on a lot of the clues and solve quite a lot. Just, you know, not the big one. Mainly I was annoyed at myself because I’d missed a few little details that I should have seen and that I’d second-guessed myself on some detail which led me down a different route. Which in some sense I’m glad about. It means that the game isn't made easier just because you’ve played the other one in the series. You still get clever puzzles and a clever case that isn't going to be affected by any foreknowledge. You’re still going to be just as challenged as you were before or maybe even more. 

Personally, I tend to play these books on my own, and it’s just nice when everyone’s gone to bed or doing their own thing to break this one out with a cup of tea and my brain food of choice. Although with the amount of sugar in some of it, I don’t suppose I can really call it brain food. This one took me about three evenings playing at least a couple of hours each, possibly a bit more, but I didn’t really time it, and I kinda just got lost in them. Which is what you ultimately want from something like this. You could easily play this with more people. I don’t think I’d want to play with more than two personally, but I generally prefer these kinds of puzzle games capped at two anyway. However, if you have a group that you like playing these types of games with, then you absolutely can. 

If you loved the first book, then you’ve probably already got this, but if you haven't, then you certainly need to think about adding it to your collection as soon as you get a chance. If you’ve played the last one, then you’ll find a comforting familiarity here that you can settle into. However, none of that detracts from anyone new jumping straight into this one. As I said, foreknowledge won’t be an advantage here. My only disappointment with this is that it’s left me wanting to dive into another one… and there isn’t one yet. Now I know why my wife waits until TV shows have finished before binge-watching them. 

Right, I’m off to binge a load of detective shows before the next book comes out because mark my words, I’ll be ready for it! There’ll be no pulling the wool over this detective's eyes! No, wait, I’ve just been told we’re going to be very busy until then. Maybe I’ll just squeeze in a couple of episodes of Murder She Wrote and hope that’s enough.