For Sale: Haunted

Thirty-one Halloween murder mysteries, each solved on a floor plan with a pencil.

Every listing in this book is a house in the made-up New England county of Larkmoor where someone died on Halloween night, and nobody ever found out who did it. Hallow & Daughters, the only realtor who will sell such places, cannot shift a single one until the death is solved. That is your job.

For each house you get a photograph, the story of that night, everyone who was there, and the floor plan. The coroner wrote down a few true facts about where each person was standing at the moment it happened. Put everyone back on the plan, one person in every row and every column, and the one person left alone in a room with the victim is the murderer.

Who it is for

Adults who like a mystery and a logic puzzle, including anyone who has never done one like this. There is no general knowledge, no arithmetic and no guessing. It is cozy rather than gruesome: nobody's death is described in any detail. It makes a good present for a puzzle lover in October, and a good game for two at the kitchen table.

What you will be able to do

• Read a floor plan by its squares, rooms and walls, and know exactly what "beside", "north of" and "alone" allow.
• Use five moves, taught one at a time, to place every person with certainty.
• Work through plans from 5 by 5 squares up to 9 by 9, with nine people and a cat.

Inside the book

• Four short lessons with pictures: the three rules, how to read a plan, a table of every kind of fact and exactly what it means, and the five moves that solve every case.
• Listing 0, solved with you: a small cottage worked through move by move, with a picture of the plan after every move.
• 31 cases in four parts that get harder steadily: Starter Homes (5 by 5 and 6 by 6), Fixer-Uppers (7 by 7, with facts that link two people), Grand Old Houses (8 by 8, with people who were alone and a cat), and Curious Properties (9 by 9: a lighthouse, a chapel and churchyard, a theater, a hotel, a school, a corn maze, a funeral home, and the realtor's own office). Each part opens with a page on anything new.
• For every case, a two-page spread: the listing (photograph, the story of that Halloween night between 1888 and 1993, and the cast), then the plan to solve on, with a key to everything drawn on it, all the facts, boxes for your answers, and links to its hint and solution.
• Hints for every case: where to start, and a checkpoint picture of the plan a few moves in.
• A full solution for every case: the solved plan, who did it and why, and every move in order with its reason.
• The SOLD board to keep score.

Every case checked

The facts are stored as data and every printed sentence is built from it. For each case a program tried every possible arrangement of the people (and the cat) and confirmed that exactly one fits all the facts, with exactly one person alone with the victim. A second program solved each case using only the five moves the book teaches, with no trial and error; its moves are the printed solutions.

Your files

• For Sale: Haunted (PDF, 123 pages, color, US Letter), with bookmarks, a linked contents page, and links from every plan to its hints and its solution.
• Plan Pad, US Letter (PDF, 33 pages): the 32 plan pages again, one to a page, for printing a clean copy.
• Plan Pad, A4 (PDF, 33 pages): the same, sized for A4 paper.
• A ZIP of all three files.

Good to know

• Print the pages, or write on them in any PDF app with a pen tool. They are not fillable forms.
• The book is US Letter; on A4 paper, print with "fit to page".
• American spelling.
• Everyone and everywhere in it is made up.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.