Middle-schoolers Melissa Burris, Wilf Samson, and Bondi Johnson are not your typical goody-two-shoes academic-scholarship material. Melissa has a thriving business doing other kids homework, Wilf is not above casual thievery to help him get by, and Bondis a popular kid who uses his status to shield the less fortunate. But for some reason the three are selected to compete for a ten-thousand-dollar scholarship, a contest requiring them to solve three clues each. Despite being sworn to secrecy, the contestants gradually seek outside help, and then one anothers help, as the competition yields more questions than answersmost notably, the questions of what the scholarship has to do with the recent death of prankster billionaire Enoch Ambrose, and why these three were selected as contestants. The clues are tricky enough to be real headscratchers, but as the kids begin to solve ?them, a set of locations in Chicago begins to emergecomplete with secret rooms on the twenty-fourth floor of the Tribune Toweralong with a possible inheritance up for grabs. A puzzle novel with heart, The Ambrose Deception harks back to Raskins The Westing Game (rev. 8/78) and Ballietts Chasing Vermeer (rev. 7/04) in its devious complexity, but with intriguing contemporary-world connections and a few unique twists of its own. anita l. burkam (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.