Can you solve the murder by Antony Johnston

I used to love 'Choose your own adventure' books when I was a child, borrowing them from the local library and becoming adept at holding my fingers as place-markers in multiple pages in the book so I could attempt to undo any mistaken choices!  So I was excited to try this grown up version, the only sad thing being that I was reading it on my Kindle!  The jumps from section to section worked well, though I missed that scrabble through the pages to find the right section during the exciting parts!   I did, initially, use the notes and highlights function on the Kindle to try to keep track of all the clues, but this quickly became completely unmanageable and I resorted to traditional paper & pen and honestly, I would recommend that as you feel much more of a detective when you're scrawling things down in a notebook!

I wasn't a very good detective, it turns out!  I failed my first attempt pretty quickly, and then I started trying to keep track of where I'd made choices that turned out to be bad choices, so that I could more easily undo rather than go back entirely to the beginning.  So, I did get there in the end, and wound up with a good rating of being a Detective Inspector, but felt slightly guilty that this might not have been warranted.  I've always felt quite suited to the role of a small village sleuth, so it's a bit sad to find that I was missing the obvious clues and repeatedly reprimanded by my superiors for making bad decisions and letting suspects get away or fail to be convicted due to lack of evidence!  

I should also admit that I tried using AI to help me crack the code in the book!  It managed a little bit, but what came out was mostly nonsense, so actually in the end I had to sit and work it out with pen and paper myself.  Which was fun and harder than I'd thought!

The actual writing isn't anything fancy, and initially that worried me, but once I started collecting clues and trying to solve the crime I stopped worrying about literary style and just enjoyed the book for the adventure it is.  This was definitely a nostalgic experience, and an interesting and unusual way to enjoy crime fiction!

With thanks to the publisher & Net Galley for my review copy.