16,560 suspects. 11 clues. One guilty name. And Alex didn't do it.

On a wet Tuesday night in March, an eighty-one-year-old records clerk is found dead at the bottom of the service stairs in Chicago's old deed annex off Randolph. The vault drawer is standing open behind him. Forty years of parcel surveys are spread across the floor.

By morning the whole city has decided who did it.

Alex Rennick. Three weeks earlier he stood up at a community board meeting and called the old man a thief with a fountain pen, in front of two hundred people, then walked out and let the door slam. Motive, temper, and a public threat with witnesses. In this city that isn't a case. It's a conviction.

There's one problem, and Detective Sergeant Thaddeus Poole is the problem.

On the night of the murder, Alex Rennick was locked in a holding cell forty feet from Poole's desk. Poole put him there at eight in the evening to sleep off a bad afternoon, and he never wrote it up. Now the only alibi in Cook County is a favour a detective did off the books, and the State's Attorney has explained exactly what that's worth to a jury.

So Poole can't fix this with his word. He's going to fix it with the records.

He hands you the consolidated precinct roll for the ten neighbourhoods that annex serves — every registered name across Little Village, Bronzeville, Greektown, Wicker Park, Pilsen, West Loop, Hyde Park, Logan Square, Uptown and Bridgeport. Sixteen thousand, five hundred and sixty names. Beside it, eleven pieces of evidence.

Eleven cuts. Work them in order. When one name is left standing, that name went up those stairs.

WHAT'S INSIDE

One single continuous case, not a book of short puzzles. One roll, one killer, one answer.
16,560 suspects across ten real Chicago neighbourhoods.
11 clues applied in strict order, each cutting deeper than the last.
A Checkpoint Card that tells you exactly how many names should survive each clue, so a wrong cut never costs you the whole case.
Clean, checkable logic only. No trick wording, no hidden meanings, no outside knowledge required.
Built for screens: every name sits on its own line so your highlighter lands on one suspect at a time.

The Verdict printed in reverse at the back, so your eye can't catch it early.
How It Connected — the full walkthrough of every thread, once you've earned it.
The Signs, an original sonnet by the author, to close the book.

Highlight them or strike them out depending on your reader.

PERFECT FOR FANS OF

Murdle, Murdoku, Can You Solve the Murder?, and the logic-grid deduction puzzles of Mystery Case Files — and for anyone who has ever wanted a whodunit that hands over the evidence and gets out of the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Rabea Hadi is a board-certified family physician and the author of the Choose Your Quest series — full-length narrative fiction and educational nonfiction across more than one hundred and sixty titles.

Years of medicine turned out to be reasonable training for building puzzles. Diagnosis is elimination: you start with everything it could be, you apply what you actually know in the order you know it, and you refuse to skip a step because the obvious answer is standing right in front of you. The obvious answer is usually the man who lost his temper in public. It is usually also wrong.

Every clue in this book was tested against all 16,560 names. Applied in order, they leave exactly one name standing. There is one answer, and only one.

The grand jury sits in fourteen days. Open the evidence file, sharpen whatever you've got, and find the name Detective Poole couldn't.