The Westing Game (which I read and loved as a kid) opens with an intriguing set-up: there’s a new five-story apartment building on Lake Michigan, and its 6 apartments (and 3 business/retail spots) are rented to a list of pre-selected tenants. The building has a view of a mansion, the Westing house, which is said to have been empty for the past fifteen years: its owner, Sam Westing, is rumored to be dead. But the tenants all (well, almost all) have some connection to Westing, and the house apparently isn’t totally empty: on Halloween, about two months after the tenants move in, they see smoke rising from one of the mansion’s chimneys. The next day there’s a newspaper headline saying Westing has been found dead, and a number of the apartment building’s inhabitants, plus a few more people connected to the building, are summoned to the Westing house. where they’re paired off, and each pair is given a $10,000 check and a set of clues. They’re told they are all potential heirs to the Westing fortune: they just need to solve the puzzle to win the game.
It’s fun to read about the various characters’ attempts to figure things out, their false starts and wild guesses and missteps, but what’s more fun is to watch them work together, or not. And the mystery of Westing’s death isn’t the only weird thing happening: there’s been a string of thefts in the building, and then bombs start going off, so there’s a lot to be figured out. The narrative switches its focus from character to character, but Turtle Wexler, a smart junior-high-school kid who’s (understandably) grumpy that her mother has always treated her differently from her (beautiful and obedient) older sister, Angela, is at the center of a lot of things, in a really satisfying way. It’s hard to say more about this book without giving away too much (it is a mystery, after all), but I like its quirkiness and strangeness, how it brings together a cast of disparate characters in a way that somehow totally works.
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