The GCHQ Puzzle Book
(Penguin, £12.99)

IF ANYONE from GCHQ is monitoring the Morning Star, here’s a spoiler: there are no hidden messages in this review of a puzzle book from our favourite eavesdroppers. Only joking.

While a few of the posers in it are straightforward, nearly all are unsolvable. But the biggest problem is that they fail to hold the interest and, when you finally give up on a puzzler and turn to the solution, you don’t get a feeling that you could have solved it or that you should have known.

Often you just find yourself thinking: “So what?”

Recurring types of brainteasers crop up but knowing how they work does not make them any easier. They just get more and more infuriating and the setters seem to be mainly interested in showing us how clever they are.

Good puzzles are those which draw the solver in or which yield a solution given a bit of thought. These do neither.

An example: In the sequence UNSAID, RANDOM, SALUTED, DANEWEEDS, DRAUGHTS, AFRAID what is the next entry? It’s QUADRATS. Each term in the series is an anagram of a day of the week with the letter Y changed to another letter. Bet you didn’t even know that quadrats is a word.

There are 160 pages of puzzles like that, making this strictly for those with too much time on their hands.

Review by Mark Dean