Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles: 1

Challenging logic puzzles that definitely get the grey cells working, and nice to have a story line to follow throughout the book as well. These are advanced logic puzzles so if you are not used to them, and also the grid type, I would suggest doing an easier logic puzzle book first.

spot on!

Great puzzle and very advanced, but answers can be hard to understand or it feels like a part is missing.

I Enjoyed this. Originally I had bought it for a friend, but having had a glance through it, decided to buy one for myself.

Really good puzzle book, never had one like this before. Would appeal to anyone, especially those who love tricky logic puzzles

Great for getting the little grey cells going! Its great how the story flows. Some of the puzzles need more than one attempt to solve but well worth doing

This was the third of three puzzle-based books I bought for my wife for Christmas and that we have tackled together. The first two were great involving both fun and head-scratching, but this one is really very dry/dull. My wife loves the logic problems found in regular newsstand puzzle magazines and, while there are elements of this book that are exactly like that, this book goes much further and in doing so manages to present an overall impression of joyless tedium (just my view of course). The story hasn't done anything to lift the experience so far (we are well over half way through) and it has become similar to doing the ironing or the washing-up; i.e. something that we feel we have to do but get very little satisfaction from. It will probably appeal to more "hardcore" logic puzzlers, but I am starting to struggle to care whether or not we get a puzzle right, which is not a good feeling. If the solution to one puzzle mattered for the next or subsequent puzzles then there might be more motivation to work at it. Disappointing, especially when compared to our experiences with the other two books we got.

I love logic puzzles but some of these are too complicated because the clues are sparse and confusing or make no sense. Many are not helpful. Eg; 'if' is used a lot: if Frank is X then Jessica is y but if Frank is not X then Beth is not z.... Problem is, the earlier clue give you no indication of what Frank is! Also when reading the explanation of the answers it's not always clear how they arrived at a result even when they state the specific clue that leads to that conclusion. I felt sometimes they were provided answers to a different draft of the puzzle! Some puzzles I did relatively easily/well to find I'd got it wrong, again because of a very loose clue or because the way the clue was written I'd been forced to make an assumption. Not sure if it's the Americanism/way it's written? The idea is good but it's poorly executed. There is no fun in constantly being confused.

Editing this because eventually I found myself enjoying this book a lot. Getting one thing out of the way.. I found the cover art intriguing but the setting and story is incredibly boring and not well written. That's not a big issue for me since I mainly want to do puzzles but I will also not ignore the story in a story puzzle book. First of all: I love a ton of the puzzles, especially the grid puzzles are fun. But the quality of puzzles varies sometimes in my opinion. English isn't my first language but I rarely find myself struggling with the english books I read or the english puzzles I solve. This one made me question my language skills from time to time. Not because of some complex prose but because I found some writing kind of confusing. The puzzles are more challenging, yes. But I find myself wondering if my english is THAT bad or if some of the puzzles hints are just worded very poorly. Sometimes there was information disclosed in the solution that I could not for the life of me get out of the statements in the puzzle itself, even when going over the solution and the puzzle several times. The wording in those instances is too vague and/or leaves room for different interpretations that make the intended interpretation not as clear as the solution suggests. That made solving some of the puzzles frustrating to me. I like a good challenge and I appreciate tricky puzzles that make me go "ooh I didn't see that!" when I take a look at the solution. This one just made me go "why would on earth would you word it in this way then?" a few times too often for my tastes. I did a actually end up buying the other books of the series and they all repeated this experience for me so far. Amazing puzzles, except when they are not.

Challenging puzzles to complete , fun and thought provoking.

I really liked the cover art haha. As for the story and puzzle I am only starting it and enjoying so far.

Loved it! I love logic puzzles and it's harder than the puzzle books I normally get. I liked that there was a running mystery through the whole book too. I considered buying it for my 14 year old who is just starting to show interest, but glad I didn't. This is not for beginners. I got her a puzzle book with different levels from easy to difficult. This one is mostly difficult puzzles. But definitely make sure you study the way things are worded. It makes a big difference in the ability to solve the puzzle. Edited to add: those reviews saying there are errors are wrong. They're just not doing it right. ALL of them are solvable. You just have to think outside the box. For the reviewer that said puzzle 2.3 had clues that don't fit--all the clues fit if you're reading it correctly. And the reviewer that said there was an error with the last puzzle and the clue should've been worded differently--it is completely correct. And the reviewer that said there were errors in puzzle 12.1 and that it should say that Jessica and Karen had 3 not 2 puzzles that they both "attempted but failed to solve" is also wrong. There are 3 puzzles they didn't solve, but one them wasn't attempted by one of them because they made the puzzle and no one who made a puzzle tried to solve their own. Bottom line: there are no errors but it IS very difficult.

I bought "Murdle" first and was disappointed with how easy even the "impossible" puzzles were. But the "Montague Island" puzzles are great! Some puzzles are "normal" advanced level logic problems. But for others, it takes time to even figure out how to tackle them! If you are looking for puzzles that really make you think, this is the book for you! The running story makes it a bit more interesting, and the puzzles are such fun. At first I was disappointed that there didn't seem to be many puzzles, especially compared to the 100 puzzles in a "Murdle". But the puzzles are so much harder and take more time to figure out that it's still worth the money for this. I've already bought the second book in the "Montague" series. Sooo good! Also for those that want it, there are full solutions that give not only the answer, but also how to get there.