I’m very pleased to announce that the thing that has been driving me half mad for two years is called The Researcher’s First Murder. I very much hope it will do the same to you later this year. 

But frankly even if, like a sensible person, you take one look at the postcards and throw them in the fire before they can get their hooks into you, the money will be well spent just for the box; thanks to the gorgeous cover illustration by Tom Gauld. I mean, just look at it. I have loved Tom’s work for years (I would tell you to check out his cartoons in the Guardian and the New Scientist, but who the hell do I think I am? Naturally you know all about them already) and it is a matter of great joy to me that I have caused him to draw a pangolin. 

As for the thing itself – the nature of it means that I can’t tell you very much about the plot or the characters, because Unbound, out of the simple goodness of their heart, are going to offer you £1000* for you to tell me about them. But I can tell you something about the structure of the puzzles. On one side of the hundred postcards are jumbled pages from a narrative, which must first be arranged into the proper order, and then fully understood, to reveal the whole story of a series of extraordinary murders that occurred in 2023. On the other side, the images on the postcards fall very obviously into ten sets of ten, each of which is a self-contained puzzle. The mechanisms of these puzzles, and types of puzzling skill required to solve them, are as different from one another as I’ve been able to make them. My hope, therefore, is that everyone who enjoys puzzles of some kind will find something to enjoy in it, and so very few people will come away without having been able to solve some part of it… but that even fewer will be able to solve absolutely everything. 

But even if you get nowhere… there is, as I say, always the pangolin. 

JF

* Unbound are offering a prize of £1000 for the first person to successfully complete The Researcher’s First Murder within six months of publication.