The Nightshade Ciphers

You are the Cipher Clerk of Scotland Yard: one desk, one lamp, and every coded thing that passes through the Metropolitan Police. On the sixteenth of October a Clerkenwell apothecary is found dead in his chair. Beside him lies a letter sealed in black wax, a pressed sprig of deadly nightshade, and a line of symbols written to you by name.

There will be nineteen letters. Crack them in order and you follow a poisoner through a foggy London winter—and back to a trial in 1878 that hanged the wrong woman.

What's inside

• 50 ciphers that tell one continuous murder mystery, in five parts, from the first letter to the last
• Twenty methods, each taught where it first appears: shift and mirror alphabets, pigpen, telegraph code, tap code, letters as numbers, keyword substitution, the square, rail fence, columnar, spiral, book cipher, null cipher, Bacon's biliteral, the Cardan grille, Vigenère, Playfair—and layered ciphers at the end
• Every key is hidden in the story, and a key clue under each document tells you where to look. No guessing, ever
• Two levels of hint (the method, then the key), full solutions, and a Handbook of Methods with every alphabet, square and table
• Fair-play clues throughout: a careful reader can name the murderer before the final letter
• Large 8.5 x 11 inch pages, generous writing space, and documents drawn to be read—letters, telegrams, newspaper notices, a pawn ticket, a playbill, a gravestone

Who it's for

Adult codebreakers, cryptogram solvers and historical-mystery readers who want a puzzle book with a real story in it. Start at the first letter; no experience with ciphers is needed. Dark and atmospheric, with murder and poisoning handled without gore.

Every cipher was checked by computer to decode to exactly one message.