The Crooked Carnival

Doctor Lazarus Mourne’s Crooked Carnival travels only in fog. This autumn it has pitched its leaning big top on Sorrowby Heath for nine nights, and you have joined the bill as the Remarkable Nobody: a stage mind-reader with no powers at all, only sharp eyes and cold logic. The Doctor has hired you for a quieter job, too. Someone is sabotaging his show.

On the first night a performer dies during the Grand Finale. On the second night, another. The Inspector arrests the wrong artiste, the undertaker’s hearse becomes a fixture at the gate, and the tickets keep selling out. To find the pattern you will question a knife-thrower who never misses, an escapologist who laughs like a creaking gate, a strongwoman who reads poetry, a ventriloquist whose dummy is ruder than he would ever dare to be, and a fortune-teller who is never wrong about small things.

What’s inside

• Nine nights, nine chains of five mixed puzzles; every chain ends in a Reckoning that turns your answers into evidence
• 50 puzzles of 10 kinds: knife boards, tarot ciphers, lying performers in the chalk ring, running-order logic grids, alibi timelines, Great Wheel seating, the Hall of Mirrors, barker’s anagrams, coconut-shy number puzzles and midway plans
• The Last Bow: a five-puzzle Finale and your Accusation
• Difficulty rising from medium to fiendish, with a hint and an answer check for every puzzle, and full solutions with the reasoning
• An illustrated cast gallery, a map of the carnival, a full-page ink illustration for every night, 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 Two of the Owlbrook Grim Tales; every book stands alone.