The Last Live Hour
Tonight is the final broadcast of WVAL, the Appalachian valley’s beloved community radio station. In the cramped studio, four people face the microphone for the last time: Marian Pike, the station manager who made the ca…
Mysteries to solve
About this collection
Stories built around a real case: a culprit who exists before you start looking, evidence you can actually gather in the wrong order, and an accusation you can get wrong. The clues are placed, not generated as you go, so the answer is the same one whether you find it in chapter three or chapter eight.
The Night Signal
For eleven years, someone has been a regular voice on WBWD-AM, the community radio station that serves as the heartbeat of Bitterwood Valley. When the station’s licence renewal is unexpectedly challenged, the volunteers …
The Seed Vault Petition
The Agri-Committee is in uproar. Botanist Mira has filed a petition to open a single drawer of the sacred seed vault to combat a blight ravaging the cassava crop. Engineer Kael denounces it as a violation of the Charter …
The Ninth Harvest
On the Ark Verdant, agronomist Tamsin Cole has spent her life tending the crops that keep humanity alive. But when she notices subtle anomalies in the Ninth Harvest cycle—wilting that shouldn't happen, nutrient levels dr…
The Salt Register
In the frozen Baltic port of the amber guild, a new apprentice named Sven arrives to take up the least desirable post in the guildhall: reconciling forty years of neglected assay books. The work is tedious and cold, conf…
The Winter Assay
In the depths of a Baltic winter, the Assay Office of Kühlhaven discovers a one-gram daily discrepancy in its amber ledger. Master Assayer Grigory, a man who trusts only his scales, must find the source of the error befo…
The Thousand-Day Timetable
It is December 15th, 1923, and the high Andean town of Quillcay is locked in winter's grip. The railway has been closed for months, but Stationmaster Emilio Vargas is found dead in his office, suffocated with a cushion. …
The Quiet Uplink
Two years after the Cold Storage platform fended off a legal challenge to its sovereignty, a new crew faces a quieter but more insidious threat. A sealed court order, delivered via the uplink, demands the production of a…
The Cold Storage
On day 14 of a 28-day rotation, the crew of the Cold Storage—a data haven on a North Sea platform—discovers that their offline archive is answering queries from nowhere. The anomaly is a crack in their world of rigid pro…
The Croft Dossier
Bristol, 1887. Board of Trade inspector Sarah Croft arrives to investigate an impossible duplicate countersign in the harbour ledgers. She already knows how it was made: three nights earlier, she traced Clerk Elias Thorn…
The Standing Countersign
At the Port of Meridian, senior clerk Samir Hassan finds Chief Clerk Arthur Pendleton's countersign on two mutually exclusive ledgers. One cargo entered by day; the other crossed Warehouse 7 at night under the same weigh…
The Fever Line
You command a medical convoy from collapsing Baltimore to Atlanta's last functioning emergency hub as linked Ebola clusters tear through the eastern corridor. The disease obeys real rules. The route's identity system doe…
The White Verdict
You are the operations deputy on an Everest expedition whose equipment auditor dies above the Icefall. At first the death looks like altitude and bad hardware. Then oxygen counts fail, weather data disappears, and the on…
The Standing Order
Mara tends an officially dead lighthouse on Black Rock because routine is easier than returning to the mainland. Then a crate arrives for Elias Croft, keeper deceased since 1971, containing lamp oil, six bowls, and a log…