Dear Detective

Dear Detective,

You have the list. Forty-six thousand names, and only one of them is mine. I know how that sounds. I know you think it’s hopeless.

It isn’t. I have been leaving you a trail, one note at a time. Each one opens the next. Read them in order and the names fall away like pieces off the board.

15 14 5 • 14 1 13 5 • 9 19 • 13 9 14 5

Your move.

— White.

A puzzle book you read like a case file

Dear Detective is a series of print puzzle books from Cryptic Killers. Each book is one killer, one obsession, and a stack of coded notes addressed to you. No app, no website, no answers unless you earn them.

Dear Detective, Checkmate.

Book one

Somewhere in this book, printed among tens of thousands of first names, is a killer who plays chess the way other people breathe. They have written to you fifteen times. Every letter is in cipher. Every cipher, once cracked, hands you the key to the next one and strikes names off the list.

The early notes are cocky and almost polite. The later ones are not. By the final five, the puzzles are built around the story itself, and the killer is running out of patience.

Hints are printed in the back, and they are encoded too. So is the solution.

  • FormatPaperback, print only
  • Notes to crack15
  • Names to eliminateTens of thousands
  • PlayersSolo, or a table of suspects
Buy the book Tell me when it’s out

Release date and stockists to be announced.

How it works

Note one

Read the letter

Each note has two parts. The plain-text body tells the story. The coded section is the puzzle. The story never tells you how the code works. That’s your job.

Note two

Crack the cipher

Solve it and you get an instruction: which names to cross out, and the key that unlocks the next note. Skip ahead and nothing makes sense.

Note fifteen

Name the killer

When the last note is broken, one name is left standing. Check it against the sealed solution in the back, if you can decode that too.

One killer. One obsession. One book.

Every Dear Detective title follows the same rule: the killer has a single fixation, and it bleeds into everything they write. In Checkmate it’s chess. The next one won’t be. You don’t need to know the hobby to solve the book, but you will know the killer by the end.

  • Dear Detective, Checkmate.Book one
  • Dear Detective, Redacted.In the drawer
  • Dear Detective, Redacted.In the drawer