Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

Lemony Snicket's last All the Wrong Questions mystery, a night-train adventure for 9 year olds full of disguises and double-dealing, is called Why is This Night Different from All Other Nights?

What happens

Snicket is almost thirteen and an apprentice in a secret organisation. He's stuck in Stain'd-by-the-Sea, a town that's fading away to nothing (they drained the sea for the ink business, which tells you a lot).

One night his chaperone, S. Theodora Markson, pretends to be asleep and then slips out. Snicket was only pretending too, of course. He follows her into a closed department store, where she swaps her clothes for a uniform off a mannequin.

Then it's off to the station. The town's only train is leaving that night, with prisoners locked in the last carriage. Everyone Snicket meets there seems to be in disguise or in a hurry, and nobody will give him a straight answer.

He has no ticket and no money. So he threatens to spoil the ending of the ticket seller's book, and when she still says no, he does it!

What he does next is much more foolish. He waits by the tracks on the edge of town and leaps onto the side of the speeding train. It's a properly heart-in-mouth scene, with bolts popping out of the railing he's clinging to.

It's the voice you'll either love or not. He explains the tricky words ("a word which here means..."), he's gloomy and very dry, and he says things like perfume smelling as if "someone's been hit by a truck full of flowers". There's a murder at the heart of this one (the very first line tells you so), but it's the puzzle that matters, not the gore.

It's the fourth and last book, and it leans on everything that came before. Old friends and enemies turn up all the time. A reader coming to it fresh could get lost fairly quickly.

If you've got a child who likes a mystery they have to work at, and a narrator who's cleverer than he lets on, this series is a real treat.

What to read next

If you're starting out, go back to Snicket's very first case with Who Could That Be at This Hour?