Joan's picks: This Tender Land and Murdle: More Killer Puzzles

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger. This is a brilliant book which originally came out four years ago, but is now out in second format and worth revisiting for anyone who may have missed it at the time. It’s about four children who escape from a terribly abusive school for Native American Indians (though actually only one of them is a Native American) and make their way down the Mississippi River from Missouri to St Louis where they believe they will find a new home. It’s set in 1932. On their way they meet a lot of characters– people affected by the Great Depression living in shanty towns, shysters, faith healers, you name it – but the spirit and determination of these kids is remarkable and their journey is an odyssey towards a better future.

Murdle: More Killer Puzzles by G.T.Karber . Sequel to Murdle, which was a runaway success last year – in fact it sold over 200,000 copies in the UK and beat things like Guinness World Records and the new Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club title to the top of the bestseller lists. It’s based on a daily puzzle website the author developed in 2021, and across the book’s 100 challenges, readers are given the scenario of a series of murders – some of them hugely inventive – for which you have to use codes and maps to decipher who the killers are – and there are four levels of difficulty. It’s a bit like a printed, extended version of Cluedo.

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