Yes, this is a children’s book – a Newbery Medal winner from 1978. This was also my absolute favorite book from when I read it as a third grader until I was in middle school and discovered fantasy fiction. I saw it in a used bookstore and decided to press my luck and re-read it, hoping it wouldn’t disappoint me as other childhood favorites had done upon a re-reading (I’m looking at you, Hitchhiker’s Guide…). It didn’t. The Westing Game begins with sixteen seemingly random individuals invited to live in a beautiful building called Sunset Towers. The individuals are then invited to the reading of the will of the wealthy Samuel Westing, recently found dead. But rather than a standard will reading, the sixteen individuals are divided into pairs and given envelopes filled with random words from which they must decipher who the murderer of Samuel Westing is. Winner receives $200 million, and the game is on. The rest of the book details the connection of the individuals to each other, and the revelation of each of the team’s sets of clues. Two decades later in a re-read, and the solution to the mystery is far more obvious than it was to me in the third grade. But the way Raskin unfolds each set of clues, and finds plausible ways to attempt to mislead the reader with the clues, and two decades later, I can better appreciate her wordplay. A definite must-read for elementary school kids, and a recommended read for adults who missed reading this gem when they were in school. Still one of my favorites.