streak
Red-Handed
The case
They carried the new foreman out of the surgery at first light.
Everyone gave an account, and one of them is false. Whoever gave it was alone at the scene. That person is the killer.
What the investigators established
▸ The kettle turned up at the workshop.
▸ The back office was clean — no sign of the rolling pin.
▸ The hammer was never at the back office.
What they each said
Esme: “Ask Bo — we were together.”
Bo: “Wherever the crowbar was, I was not.”
Gus: “I never went near the surgery.”
Hana: “The kettle was never in my hands.”
Iris: “I was the one carrying the hammer.”
Ora: “Iris and I were together the whole time.”
Drag each suspect into a chair, and each object into the room it was found in. Tapping works too.
Marrow Bay and the people in it
Every case is drawn from the same small town. You will meet these sixteen again and again — the same trades, the same grudges, the same debts. Read them the way a consulting detective would: as character, not as evidence. Nothing here places anybody anywhere, and a baker is as likely to be at the ferry dock as behind the counter.
Up before dawn, so sees everyone who moves. Still sore about last year’s pie judging.
Has a key to every door in town, and swears that means nothing.
Tends every animal in the bay — and every hive of Gus’s. Knows all the back paths.
Owes Jax more than a season’s wages. The ferry runs anyway.
Sells flowers to people who feel guilty. Business is good.
Can fix anything with an engine, and charges whatever the day allows.
Keeps bees and grudges. Only one of the two stings.
Runs the library, and the quietest gossip network in the bay.
Winds every clock in town, so knows exactly when everything happened.
Keeps the saloon, and keeps the book of debts. Half the town is in it.
Reads nobody’s letters, and somehow knows all their news.
Mends coats and hears confessions. Neither one leaves the shop.
Photographs everything, and has not spoken to Ada since the judging.
Mends shoes, and can tell where a person has walked from the mud on them.
Extends credit and collects favours. The ledger is memory.
Keeps the light, sees the whole bay, and admits to nothing.
About expert Red-Handed
Expert deliberately keeps Hard’s six suspects and four rooms. A bigger board is not a harder one — more suspects means more ways for the evidence to sit consistently, so each statement rules out less. Expert buys its step up in depth instead: one more round of reasoning before the case gives way.
The long chains start here. A deduction you make in the fourth step is often only available because of something you worked out in the second, which is why writing the board down beats holding it in your head.
There are 600 expert cases. Every one has exactly one arrangement that fits, proved by a separate program before it ships, so no case ever needs a guess.