SUSPEK - Murder in Lake Tahoe

47,000 first names. 17 clues. 1 killer.

On the Friday before Christmas, with colored lights in the pines along Lake Tahoe's West Shore and carols on the night plow's radio, the lead of the lake's clarity program is found drowned at the edge of the boathouse dock at the Homewood pier. Her red wool cap floats in the black water below. Her gifts for the crew wait under the office tree, tagged in her own hand. The lake never freezes. The planks do. Detective Hartmann takes the case and slides the clarity log across the desk. Inside: forty-seven thousand first names from sixty-odd years of readings, each cast signed by the hand that drew it. One of them belongs to the killer.

This is Christmas on the West Shore the way the people who work there live it: snow on the pines, a white fir in the field office with an old Secchi disk wired on top for a star, a neighbor's tin of cookies beside the coffee, the Christmas stroll in Tahoe City, and a case as cold as the lake.

SUSPEK is not a crime novel you simply read. It is a case you solve yourself.

Read the clues, cross out the innocent, and find the killer before the trail goes cold.

SUSPEK is puzzle-crime on paper. Reading, puzzling, thinking, no screen, no app. You sit at the table with the book, cross out names, compare lists, and follow every trace. At the end, one name remains.

What you are getting into

• A logic puzzle with 47,000 possible answers and one correct one
• 17 clues that bring you step by step closer to the killer
• A closed crime case to solve yourself
• Deduction, logic, and the real feel of a detective
• Puzzle pleasure as a series

For everyone who has finished Murdle. For everyone who already knows if Alice is a killer. And for everyone who does not want to merely watch while somebody else solves the case.

An interactive crime puzzle in which the reader becomes the detective. Perfect for the long evenings between Christmas and New Year.

Also works as a standalone.

Difficulty: Advanced. The clues form a cascade of near-solutions. Experienced solvers should plan 10 to 30 hours; for fans of layered logic puzzles.

Every volume is a standalone case. New city. New victim. New name list. New perpetrator, hidden among thousands of ordinary identities.

Help Detective Hartmann in his other cases as well. A fitting Christmas gift for puzzle-mystery solvers, fans of investigative fiction, and anyone planning to spend the holidays with a pencil and a highlighter.

Open the book. Find the killer.