Oh dear, another case of netgalley breaking my bank here... I am definitely ordering this book together with the others in the series.

The book has different stories and each page of the story features a puzzle. You collect clues by solving the puzzles and then you get to see the story ending with the collected clues. It works a bit like a heist.

I love it. Off to Amazon to buy it and the other two now.

An attractive puzzle book with a literary theme. Includes a mixture of word-based and visual puzzles suitable for ages 6+.

My KS2 class enjoy solving puzzles and there is a good assortment in here which would keep them busy for some time. This is definitely something they could enjoy individually or working together.

This is a compact puzzle book that is ideal for travelling. I like how there is a story to these activity books, linking the challenges by a common theme. Not only that, there are clues to discover throughout the book to solve the ultimate mystery.

The book could be dipped in and out of but this would certainly make reading the overall story quite confusing. Answers are provided at the back, along with several blank Notes pages. I like that there are also Notes pages dotted throughout the book too.

Activities include: code words, word wheels, mazes, number puzzles and maths problems. Some activities are more challenging than others; I think this book would be best enjoyed by both boys and girls from 9 years.

It is a lovely activity book but you do need to carefully choose your writing instrument: too blunt a pencil will be too faint; ink pens will bleed. I would recommend a mechanical pencil if possible, or a sharpener on hand!

This is a great, engaging series to pass the time and to encourage reading too.
Thanks to Net Gallery & Collins Kids for this Book.

I was expecting something like the Usbourne Puzzle Adventures I loved as a kid, but this is a lot simpler than that... though there are more puzzles.

If you think of this as a book of puzzles for kids with a loose storyline to tie it all together then you won't be disappointed.

`This is such a fun book, with a huge amount of puzzles to solve it is prefect for keeping kids learning during the school holidays without them even realising it! Numbers and literacy are promoted, (for example through word search type puzzles). A fun storyline runs through to make everything cohesive. I absolutely love this concept and wouldn't hesitate to. buy or recommend it! Id estimate it to appeal to ages 7 through 11 or thereabouts!

My thanks to NetGalley, author and publisher for the opportunity to review this book in exchange for an advance copy.

Great fun for kids doing puzzles as the story progresses. My kids have read others in this series and enjoyed them, and I've no doubt they'd enjoy this one too.

Well, it's a good job the puzzles here are so nicely matched to the young audience intended for this, because the story is absolutely rubbish! Or... I'm glad the creators didn't worry about the story, knowing that if we spend a lot of time working out the posers we will not really be able to respond to a decent narrative in any worthwhile way.

This is a really suitable way to get a young child with their nose in a book, even if as I say the story is just too ramshackle to be thought highly of. It starts as if it's almost a choose-your-own-adventure thing, where you're told you have three items and have to collect clues from the book and write them down. The first chunk (once we've met the magical owl from the cover) is set loosely on a ship of piratical parrots, but don't worry, you rescue three bears from there and sort their Goldilocks-inflected problems out, and then follow the cowboy cow (who rides a horse, obviously) to rid its town of a monster, which you then take with you into the next chunk...

The reasonable thing is the visuals and just enough of the story are there to differentiate each chapter, whose end provides a pause from all the puzzling where you leave your clues and wait for the next, different chunk to start. You then get to the final puzzle, which also generates a code for using online at a special page from the publishers, furthering the value (and collectability) of this series of books.

It's nice, as I say, that the puzzles are so well done. Yes, some are expected – word-searches, mazes, spot-the-differences, and so on – but some are of a fairly exotic derivation. Now and again you get a word/letter puzzle, with a grid whose letters appearing once only you must spot, which has an adult variant whose name I forget that crops up in those Japanese number logic poser compilations. The offering is fairly similar each chapter – they do like to dress a small sudoku up as a relevant plot element, and any excuse to use a next-in-sequence number question or three.

But all told the book is a clever one, and one I'd find it easy to recommend. If only it didn't age me – I remember a time when this would have been badged up as "brain training" for the young, which it is of course, except for us seemingly dropping the term. I don't have a passing pre-teen to prove how much time the hundred-odd puzzle pages, with their tiny snippets of bonkers narrative each, would be engaged with, but considering this is pretty much a use-once article, I think it would still be a worthwhile purchase. Unpretentious, simple yet edifying mental action for the summer holidays – what's not to like? Well, the pronoun-mangling, for one, but very little else. I'd go with a strong four for this.

But word to the wise – don't just focus on this being the highest on amazon's amalgamated wishlist for kids' books – it's not the best in the series.

This puzzle book is exactly the type of thing I would have adored as a child and my eldest loves books like this too. I feel they encourage a love of learning in a more traditional paper based manner while being fun.

I really liked that there are so many picture based puzzles, fun modern illustrations and a mixture of maths, English and problem solving based activities. The variety of themes is engaging with lovely little storylines interwoven to encourage determination to crack the codes!

This is one of a series of Collins Puzzle Quest books and I will definitely be looking to buy these for my 9 and 6 year olds to use at home or on long journeys.