Red Wolf's Room

  Screenshot of digital game cover from Alex Hill Mystery As a seasoned Nancy Drew gamer, I was excited to hear that various people were making games based on HeR Interactive's Nancy Drew mystery series . Already, we had Miss Clue , but that series had its bugs and other issues that made gameplay unpleasant and/or impossible. Alex Hill: Whispers at White Oak Inn by hannahontrek is a slower, low-pressure mystery rife with Nancy Drew references and high stakes.  The Concilio Detective Agency is asked by Ronnie Bahir, a 25-year-old concierge at White Oak Inn, to investigate the threats he's been receiving and if the inn's hauntings are connected since they started up only a few months ago. The case is given to Alex Hill who is back from suspension. On the car ride there, she witnesses a ghostly, glowing figure walking across the lake near the inn, so already, the game is a foot! When Alex checks in with Ronnie, she learns that a girl named Audrey died in a boating accident ...

  After reading Footsteps in the Dark , I tried to find more obscure female mystery writers that are not quite so well known and found The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham. What interested me was the dinner party that turns into murder. It reminded me of the Hercules Poirot mystery Lord Edgeware Dies and Clue .  Unfortunately, the murder gets upstaged for the second half of the book by another crime, and the solution to the first mystery was unnecessarily dragged out for me. I lost interest in the last third of the book and just wanted it to end. The book is written in true Roaring Twenties lingo, so there were quite a few times where I couldn't understand what the characters were saying, even with context.  In the reviews I read before picking up this book, I learned that Albert Campion is Margery Allingham's detective, but his debut novel (this book) does not have him as the protagonist and frankly, he's not even a detective. He is strangely almost always up...

  Thanks to Sia for giving me ideas while writing this post.    -- Spoilers -- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson left me feeling unsettled, much like The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. Real-life mystery-thrillers seem to have that effect on me. I think it was worse in this book because when I was halfway through, I had the brilliant idea to look at the sequel excerpt because I wanted to see what the next mystery would be. However, I spoiled myself for one of this book’s culprits. I didn’t expect Book 2 to continue from Book 1. I expected it to start anew like the other books (not just mysteries) I’ve read and later down the line mention Book 1’s culprits. So knowing whom I thought was the only culprit, I reflected on Pip’s investigation thus far and was upset that we had had only one conversation with Mr. Ward and nothing was given away. We also had one or two quick encounters where Pip runs into him and asks him a question or two. It wasn’t hard to re...