Seven Nights Dead

You wake up standing at your own funeral on Sepulchre Hill. The Lord Mayor gets your name wrong, a professional mourner weeps beautifully for a fee, and the doctor’s certificate says you fell down the Archive stairs. You did not fall.

You are the late Lark Hollowell, Keeper of the Sorrowby Town Archive, and the fog is coming for you in seven nights. The living cannot hear you. The dead gossip, and some of them lie. So you decode the knocks of the ghost on the stair, push a planchette across a frightened medium’s table and rebuild your last evening, minute by minute, until you can name the one who killed you.

What’s inside

• 49 puzzles in seven nightly chains; each night ends with a deduction built from that night’s answers
• 10 kinds of puzzle: spirit-board ciphers, knock codes, ledger ciphers, ghost testimony (truth-tellers and liars), memory nonograms, mourners-and-graves grids, crypt mazes, epitaph word puzzles, alibi timelines and floor plans
• A final accusation on the seventh night
• Every kind of puzzle explained with an example where it first appears (seven kinds on Night One, three on Night Two), rising to fiendish by Night Seven
• Ink portraits of the living and the dead, a map of Sepulchre Hill and a cutaway of the Archive
• Answer checks, hints and full solutions with the reasoning; every puzzle computer-checked for a single answer

For grown-up puzzlers who like their mysteries gothic, their humor dry and their clues fair. Solve each night’s chain in order, write your answers in the book, and check each one before you move on. Somewhere in the pictures, a one-eyed raven is hiding.