Simon & Schuster Hooked on Cryptics Treasury #1: 70 challenging cryptics from the Henry Hook archives (Simon&Schuster No 1)

i have to agree with ianm i can access the crosswords but cant put answers in. have asked amazon and am waiting for an answer with baited breath. i hope i can transfer to my pc and print them off.

Timely delivery. Well packaged. Excellent puzzles.

Good

What ruined this book for me were the frequent obscure words or dated proper noun references.It's frustrating to be stuck and not know whether I'm missing the twist, or whether I simply have never heard the term before ("in a pet") or the reference is dated but not clued a such ("nancy" for first lady).I prefer The Atlantic Monthly's style of declaring how many obscure and proper nouns are used in the puzzle.Beyond that, as a fan of aesthetic mathematical puzzles, I find Hook's basic grid boring. I much prefer Cox and Rathvon's puzzles that layer a logic or diagramming puzzle on top of the cryptic, and add a unifying theme. I find such puzzles more meaningful, and the overarching connectivity gives critical help when I'm completely stuck on a wordplay clue that involves a word I simply do not know.A great delight of a Cox/Rathvon puzzle is backsolving all the letters of an answer, and then looking it up in a dictionary to discover is is a word that means exactly what the clue says. This is missing from Hook's puzzles.Also, it's rewarding to "crack a puzzle" and discover the secret theme or hidden treasure, which gives a sense of elevated accomplishment even if I can't solve every crossword clue.This book will definitely kill time on long airline flight, but it's simply not as fun as Cox an Rathvon's work in the Atlantic Monthly.