Sherlock Holmes Escape Room Puzzles Paperback – September 7, 2021

Bought as a gift for my brother and he and his wife are both loving the challenges.

We love escape puzzles, so we were excited to start this book. The puzzles are all convoluted and obscure...think doing a lot of tedious math to convert a long sheet of symbols into a very short and not helpful message. Although my husband and I enjoyed the story and beautiful illustrations, the puzzles didn't make a lot of sense as part of the overall Sherlock mystery. The hints were also unhelpful and pointless. I'd suggest passing on this book. There are lots of other, better mystery puzzle books available.

Received this as a gift. The overall idea is cute, but the execution is lacking. The puzzles just aren't very Holmes-y and on occasion the puzzles are outright daft: at one point, Watson must find out where a body was found by police, while visiting Scotland Yard and reading their file on that case -- a file freely offered for Watson's perusal. You'd think such basic info as where the body was found should be in the file, but instead you must do a tedious tracing of patrol routes and times. At another time, Watson must compute a recipe for an anaesthetic. This is quite straightforward, but the recipe in question is clearly designed for the purpose of a puzzle, and not to be in any way realistic. This may not sound like a big deal (it "only" ruins immersion), but this kind of puzzle -- having to follow longish sequences of arbitrarily specified steps -- is quite frequent in the book and quite tedious.Most of the time, the puzzles don't make sense given what we know of who set them up and what time constraints they were under.

Bought as a gift for 1 of my granddaughters & she loved it!!!