"The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east."

And so begins The Westing Game, a children's mystery written in 1978 by Ellen Raskin, one of only four novels she ever wrote. It is a perfect book—or at least, for me as a kid, it was as close as it ever got.

The Westing Game tells the story of a series of neighbors, all invited to move into the aforementioned Sunset Towers, built on the shore of Lake Michigan. They are strangers to each other at first, but quickly learn that they are all heirs to the fortune of paper mill magnate Samuel Westing, and whoever solves the puzzle laid out in his will inherits his millions. Each heir is paired with a stranger and the newly formed twosome is given a set of clues, each different than the ones the other teams received.

At that point the game, as they say, is afoot.

I don't remember where I first came across The Westing Game. Probably at the library, where I would walk out with an armload of books every week. Maybe it was at school, where my teacher often put books into my hands she thought I'd like. However it was, I read it and turned around and read it right away again, I remember that for sure. At some point I acquired a copy of my own and it has accompanied me—increasingly dog-earned and torn and yellowed—ever since.

The Westing Game was the first book I read that didn't lie to me. It didn't lie the way Encyclopedia Brown lied, by keeping details hidden until the conclusion, making it impossible to solve the mystery on your own. There were no hidden clues in The Westing Game. From the very first sentence on, if you looked close enough, the answer to its central mystery was right there to discover.

But the book didn't lie about bigger things either: That parents were flawed, that adults were hiding secrets, that the world worked in ways that were both unclear and unfair. It was clear-eyed in the many ways that people fail themselves and each other, and it offered no straightforward solutions to any of it.

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