The Sunday Crossword

Adele Price has worked the Register-Journal Sunday crossword every week since 1974. She knows the difference between a coincidence and a construction.So when four consecutive Sunday grids spell out the names of two girls who vanished years apart, the retired English teacher picks up the phone. The newspaper tells her the constructor goes by a pseudonym, T. Ambler, and nobody is at liberty to say more.Adele keeps digging. Microfilm. Post office records. Pencil marks in the margins that were never corrections. Across nineteen years and three Alabama counties, seven missing girls have been hidden in plain sight, one long answer at a time.Someone has been leaving a trail. Someone else has been making sure nobody follows it.Then the warnings arrive. STOP SOLVING. A photograph of her car, taken from close enough to see what she carries. Investigators who want proof she doesn't have yet. And people who seem to know exactly how close she's getting.Then a new Sunday puzzle prints a name Adele knows better than her own.Her seventeen-year-old granddaughter's.THE SUNDAY CROSSWORD is a slow-burning Southern mystery of approximately 100,000 words, built for readers who love sharp-minded amateur sleuths, small-town secrets, and a puzzle that matters more than anyone realized. No graphic violence. No explicit content. No easy answers.