At a Glance
- Read by: Cassandra Campbell is the only name in the credit, which leaves sixteen heirs and one voice to separate them across just under seven hours.
- At its heart: Puzzle mystery, word play, inheritance games, an ensemble of strangers thrown together.
- Vibe: Playful and tricky, faintly wintry, more riddle than menace.
- Short version: Worth it for puzzle-minded kids and read-along households, provided you accept that every clue arrives once and does not wait.
Sixteen heirs turn up for the reading of a will in the opening pages of this children's mystery, and the audiobook hands every one of them to a single reader. Cassandra Campbell has 6 hours and 59 minutes to keep them straight, which is a problem a print reader solves by glancing back up the page and a listener cannot solve at all. Listening Library issued the recording in December 2017, priced at $8.95. The five written responses sitting under it are worth reading before you buy, though not for the reason you would expect.
A Will, a Fortune, and Samuel Westing's Last Game
Ellen Raskin's novel arrived with a Newbery Medal, and the publisher's copy stacks the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and an ALA Notable Book citation on top of it. The setup is a will, a game and a fortune: sixteen unlikely people gather to hear the last wishes of the very rich Samuel W. Westing, learn that they could become millionaires depending on how they play, and are told that all they have to do is find the answer. The copy then twists the knife by asking the answer to what. Blizzards, burglaries and bombings follow, and the dead man keeps taking his turn.
Word play is the engine here. The jacket calls it "a puzzle-knotted, word-twisting plot filled with humor, intrigue, and suspense", and the line quoted from The New York Times Book Review runs "Great fun for those who enjoy illusion, word play, or sleight of hand." Both sentences describe a book that assumes your eye can travel backward. In audio the clues arrive once, in sequence, at whatever pace the reader sets. That is not a defect so much as a different game, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you press play.
Cassandra Campbell is the only name in the narration credit, and sixteen heirs is a heavy load for one voice. The publisher promises a remarkable cast of characters; the response titled More Variety Than Disneyland backs that up from the reading side, noting that the sixteen come from very different backgrounds with very different personalities and that most are sketched in a trait or two, "a tendency to kick people, a permanent stutter, or a habit of unwrapping candy bars". Traits drawn that broadly are a gift to a solo narrator, because each one can be played as a sound. Whether this recording takes the gift is something the page never says.
Nearly Seven Hours Help a Listener Track Sixteen Suspects
Robin gives it five stars under the heading "An interactive whodunnit that's fun for all ages", and interactive is the right word for what the book asks of a reader. Robin's account of finding it is the most charming thing on the page: wandering a local library, choosing books purely by their covers, falling for this one, then losing it so completely that for years the story felt invented. Anyone who grew up hunting library shelves will recognize the feeling.
Nic bought it to get a teenager reading and reports that it worked, calling the mystery "smart, fast-paced, and fun to follow" and crediting it with holding a young reader's attention. Masumi came to it on a teacher's recommendation. Those two routes in, the parent trying to hook a reluctant reader and the classroom assignment, are exactly the routes a 7-hour recording serves well: one is a household that can listen together, the other is a student who has to keep sixteen suspects in mind for a discussion in class.
Length is a genuine argument in favor of the audio. Just under seven hours is a long sitting for a middle-grade title, and Raskin front-loads the reader with names, apartments, jobs and pairings that a listener absorbs more gently than an eye scanning a cast list. A narrator who commits to a voice per heir turns the setup into character work instead of homework. The tag on this listing says Humor, and the comedy in the book is real, which gives a performer plenty to play with in the will-reading scenes.
Masumi's Three Stars Question Why Sixteen People Were Summoned
The response column is mostly reviewing paper. Nic names the format outright, praising a paperback version that is easy to carry around and good for school or travel. Robin's story turns on a physical copy returned to a library and never seen again. Neither entry is dishonest, but the object graded in them is not the file you would be downloading, and neither touches Campbell's work.
One entry is close to unreadable and still carries a four-star grade. Filed under the title "A book" by Patricia, it runs in full: "A book that was a book, murder mystery, book, interesting book, it was very much so a book book book". Whatever that is, it is a vote that counts toward the number on the badge exactly as much as a considered paragraph does.
Two of the five bodies break off in the middle of a word. Robin's stops at "fabulous protagoni" and the Disneyland entry stops at "get unlimited en", so whatever either was building toward is not on this page. Masumi's three-star response is the only sustained criticism visible, and it is a structural one: why sixteen people are summoned as possible relatives of the late Sam Westing, and why the person who was genuinely related kept quiet, struck this reader as unexplained. Take that as a real caution for listeners who want their mysteries to seal shut.
The badge reads 4.4 across eight votes, and with five responses legible the remaining three are numbers with no sentences attached. Both series fields on the listing are empty, so nothing here tells a buyer whether more is coming. Raskin's puzzle is a standalone as far as this page is concerned, and the only guide to what you are getting is the copy, the credit and the runtime.
Skip It If You Need to Flip Back
Households that listen together are the ideal buyers. This is a book built to be argued about between chapters, and a car full of people guessing at the will is closer to the way Raskin wrote it than a solo listen ever gets. Kids who like codes, riddles and unreliable adults will be well served, as will adults revisiting a Newbery title they half remember. Teachers assigning it should know the recording gives a class a shared pace, which is useful when sixteen names have to be kept in order.
Skip it if you want to annotate, cross-reference or double back, because this is a plot that rewards flipping and audio does not flip. Buyers who need reassurance about the performance before spending money should also hold off, since the credit and the runtime are all this page offers on that front. Anyone hoping for a verdict on the reading itself will have to be the first person here to write one.
