streak
Red-Handed
The case
The company man was found face down at the tailor shop.
Everyone gave an account, and two of them are false. One of those two liars was alone at the scene. That person is the killer.
What the investigators established
▸ The bakery was clean — no sign of the flower pail.
▸ The flower pail was never at the market.
▸ The wrench turned up at the library.
▸ The bakery was clean — no sign of the rolling pin.
What they each said
Finn: “If you find the wrench, you find where I was.”
Esme: “I was with Jax.”
Jax: “Ask Finn — we were together.”
Sol: “If you find the flower pail, you find where I was.”
Bo: “I was at the bakery.”
Ada: “The rolling pin was never in my hands.”
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 sherlock Red-Handed
Sherlock cases demand the longest chains in the set and are solvable by pure logic from the first line to the last. There is never a moment where a guess is the best available move — which is the whole reason the tier carries the name.
If you are stuck, you have not run out of information — you have missed a deduction. Go back to the forensic lines, which are the only statements that cannot be lies, and rebuild from there.
There are 600 sherlock cases. Every one has exactly one arrangement that fits, proved by a separate program before it ships, so no case ever needs a guess.