Once again it's puzzle time, with this further book in the series allowing you – the reader, always addressed in the second person – to BAMF around the world's history finding technological breakthroughs. To start with you're in a modern museum at the beginning of a treasure hunt exercise, the next moment you're haring around Syracuse with Archimedes' apprentice, trying to defend the place from Romans, and find the great man – and his manual. When you touch that it BAMFs you to the Rainhill locomotion trials, where someone is trying to sabotage The Rocket and prevent it from winning.

And so it goes on – one noted slice of history after another, where you might learn a smidge of history, but you'll have over a dozen puzzles to solve, before it's on to the next. I still like this series more for the puzzles than the stories – here you're asked to do the more modern kind, such as Pipes, and that train track one your parents may do in their newspaper or brain training. Those 'which container fills first?' tasks have a phase on social media every now and again – a couple are here.

Alright, there is perhaps too much code-breaking and not the routine variety when we get to Bletchley Park, but all the same, this is fine for the standard breadth of puzzles – generally of a suitable level for the audience (and a couple of ones I still had no idea over when quitting). It is still these that these books should be bought for, not the narrative elements – the book gives the wrong impression of carrier pigeons, for one. But if you don't mind that the story set-up is all cockamamie, and seems to be the same idea every book in this series, then this could be a four star puzzler.

Another title in this set was reviewed here:- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7528796844

I read this with my 7-year-old daughter and she loved it! I requested this book because her favourite book series is Sherlock Bones which is a mix of story and puzzles to solve so I thought that this would be a good next step. From my perspective, this book had less story content, but loads more puzzles than the Sherlock Bones books which is great for us because it's really solving the puzzles that she enjoys the most. As she is at the lower end of the age range, some of the puzzles were quite difficult for her and she needed my help but there was a good range and variety so she could complete some on her own. In particular, she enjoyed the code breaking puzzles and spot the difference. I think that if she was a little older she would maybe enjoy the more logic / problem solving puzzles more too. Really enjoyed reading this book together, it's great if you only have a small amount of time because you can do one of two pages and stop easily. We will definitely be reading more from the series!

I love a puzzle book and as a science teacher this is perfection!
A great puzzle book, a range of different activities that my students would love to solve. I will be buying copies as end of year prizes for those hard working science enthusiasts I teach!