Candles for the Moth Queen

Every year for forty years, the Widow Wickersham has held a midnight ball in the fog-bound town of Gloomwick — for moths. Tonight is the fortieth, and you have been hired as the Candle-Keeper. For every dance, from eight o’clock until dawn, the great ballroom floor must be lit: every square of it, with no two candles in sight of each other, and the numbers on the Widow’s black marble pillars obeyed exactly. Gloomwick legend says the Moth Queen visits the brightest ballroom in the world once in a lifetime and grants its hostess a single wish. The Widow has been making her ballroom brighter for forty years.

What’s inside

• 100 original light-up logic puzzles in ten chapters, one for each dance of the night, from Easy 7×7 floors to Fiendish 14×14
• Every puzzle has exactly one solution, checked by computer, and can be solved by logic alone, without guessing
• Clear rules with diagrams, a step-by-step worked example and six illustrated solving tricks
• A gently haunting story told through the Widow’s dance card and a naturalist’s old field notebook, with a twist at dawn
• Whimsical black-and-white illustrations, and a small black cat hiding in seven of them
• Large 8.5 × 8.5 inch pages, one puzzle per page, full solutions at the back

How it works

Place candles on the white squares of the ballroom floor. A candle lights its own square and shines up, down, left and right until a pillar stops the light. Every white square must be lit, no candle may shine on another, and a number on a pillar tells you exactly how many candles stand beside it.

For adults who love logic puzzles, brain teasers and all things darkly charming: a thoughtful gift for fans of gothic stories and moonlight. Book 2 of the Owlbrook Oddities, complete on its own.