A Crime Fiction Puzzle from England (Nat'l Puzzle Day = Jan 29!), CAIN'S JAWBONE

Do you check off each red herring and clue and twist as you read a mystery, competing to solve the crime before the book's investigator? Have you ever argued about whether Sherlock Holmes correctly interpreted the facts in selecting the criminal? How do you feel about really hard puzzles??

"Torquemada," a name associated with the Inquisition, became the pen name of Edward Powys Mathers as he created cryptic crosswords in Britain in the 1920s. When he published, in 1934, a "selected" group of his puzzles in a book, he added to them a highly unusual puzzle: 100 pages of a crime novel, "out of sequence." Solving these for the correct sequence would reveal the murder details of the story. (And solving the crime would assist arranging the pages.)

In an unusual crowd-funded celebration of this intense puzzle called CAIN'S JAWBONE (supposedly after the "first murder weapon"), Unbound recently republished the puzzle in a clever new form: a box of the 100 pages, each on a numbered card, to make it simple to keep track of rearranging them. Solve the puzzle, submitting your correct results before September 19, 2020, and you may win $1,000. Attempt it, and you'll experience both a unique crime fiction challenge and a sense of a large community of people trying the same thing.

Interested? Treat yourself to a "copy" of this "book" in honor of National Puzzle Day, January 29. And read more about it here.


PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.