Locked in the Waxworks

It is the fiftieth-anniversary gala of Tallow’s Waxworks of the Wicked, and you are the new night-watch, hired this very evening. Just before midnight Madame Tallow, proprietor and sculptor, is found dead in the chair of her own most famous tableau, a silver cup at her hand. Then the clockwork doors seal every room until dawn.

Six guests are locked in with you: a gambling brother-in-law who talks in odds, a towering collector of death masks, an enormous chandler who smells of honey, a lecturer on the science of skulls, a small gray ticket-seller who notices everything, and a nervous apprentice sculptor who says he went home at six. Every one of them is hiding something, and every door opens only to a code hidden in its room.

What’s inside

• 13 locked rooms, each a chain of mixed puzzles: the answers set the dials of the next door and tell you what the room saw
• 52 puzzles of 10 kinds: observation plates, ciphers, logic grids, floor plans, alibi timelines, mazes, letter sudoku, tumbler locks, picture grids and word searches
• A gentle first room rising to a fiendish finale, and a final Accusation to make before dawn
• Two levels of hints, an answer check for every answer, and full solutions with the reasoning
• An illustrated cast gallery, a plan of the museum, a full-page ink picture for every room, and Dirge the raven hiding in seven pictures

Every puzzle was checked by computer to have exactly one solution. For adults who like their mysteries dark, their humor darker and their logic airtight. Book One of the Owlbrook Grim Tales; every book stands alone.