Every page in this book is black. That is the trick, and it is a genuinely good one. A paper spotlight slides into the side of each page, and wherever you move it a small circle of the scene lights up, so finding Waldo becomes a hunt conducted through a keyhole rather than a scan across an open spread.

The setting is Halloween: a swamp crossing, a looming castle, a dungeon, a creepy gallery of paintings, and a twist near the end that regular readers of the series do not see coming. Odlaw is involved. Witches, vampires and night frights are everywhere, and the light itself becomes part of the game, since shining it too long on a vampire is said to turn him to dust.

The whole mechanism is paper. No batteries, no electronics, nothing to die halfway through October. It is Waldo's second book using this all paper spotlight design, and the format survives a car journey better than anything with a switch on it.

Large format hardcover, sixteen pages of dense Martin Handford crowd scenes. It occupies a child for far longer than its page count suggests, and it comes back out every autumn.