Our Summer Reading series continues this week with some puzzle solving and some mystery solving! (Can it top The Case of the Crossword Cipher? Keep reading to find out!)

This week, join me as I investigate Death at Penrose Manor by Desirée Penner and Jeff Sinnock.

An extravagant party awaits at the home of the eccentric and mercurial Roan Penrose, newspaper magnate and man with a penchant for antagonizing those around him.

So it’s no surprise when he turns up dead during the event.

Thankfully one of the guests, police constable Jade Miller, immediately calls detective Jude Marlow, and now Marlow must unravel a web of lies, motives, and bruised egos in order to solve the murder.

Can you puzzle out which of the nine suspects committed the murder? To do so, you’ll have to read through the interrogations, solve a crossword related to each suspect, and crack the case.

Death at Penrose Manor is a fun riff on both Agatha Christie-style murder mysteries and the trappings of the board game Clue, right down to the colorfully-named suspects and the layout of Penrose Manor.

The puzzles are mostly solid (one or two awkward words per grid), but mostly well-constructed and accessible. The cluing is straightforward, with a few sharp and clever clues peppered throughout.

Your average solver will blaze through these grids, and murder mystery fans who aren’t frequent puzzle-solvers should do fine as well.

(I can’t really dig into the book more without potentially spoiling it, so today’s review will be a little shorter than the others.)

But all in all, I had fun with Death at Penrose Manor. The mix of mystery and puzzles worked really nicely, the characters were hammy in the best way, I enjoyed scribbling notes and theories as I progressed throughout the book, and the reveal at the end was a satisfying one.

This one gets a thumbs-up from me.

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Are you doing any reading this summer, puzzly or otherwise, fellow reader? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.