Twelve Impossible Murders

Twelve cases. Twelve locked rooms, unbreakable alibis, and impossible deaths. And a detective who used to build illusions for a living, now spending her retirement taking them apart. Cordelia Kestrel spent twenty years as a stage magician before an accident sent her into a different trade: proving that what looks impossible never actually was. Insurers, defence barristers, and one reluctant police inspector call her in when a case has no solution - a lighthouse keeper found dead behind a bolted door with the great lamp still turning, an alibi backed by ten thousand live radio listeners, a woman who vanishes from one locked sleeping-car compartment and turns up dead in another that was locked too. Narrated by her friend and chronicler Sam Okafor, this casebook collects twelve fair-play mysteries in the classic tradition - every clue shown to the reader before the reveal, every impossibility given a physical, human explanation. No withheld evidence. No last-page tricks. Just twelve sealed rooms, and a woman who knows exactly how a sealed room is built. Readers who love Agatha Christie's short mysteries, Chesterton's Father Brown, the puzzle-box precision of John Dickson Carr, or the modern fair-play revival of Anthony Horowitz and Knives Out will feel right at home. But Kestrel does not always win. Twice in this volume, the case closes without a name, without a confession, and without certainty - an honest reminder that some doors, however hard you push, stay shut. Twelve impossible murders. Ten solved. Two that never let her sleep again.