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A magazine of original mystery, cozy to hardboiled — read each case, or hear it narrated, with detectives you'll come back to.
Today's story
The spectrometer said the wine was a forgery, the master of wine agreed, and a man's life was to be ended over a bottle — and not one of them had thought to ask the only question that matters about a fake, which is who it was made to please.
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A torch singer hired me to find her kid sister, and I found her, which is the part of this work nobody warns you can be the cruelest thing you do all year.The Number That Was Never Called
There were nine setters at the centenary table, and only one of them could have written the last clue in the dead man's grid — because only one of them already knew how the evening would end.The Clue That Cut the Thread
Nettlecombe had buried Walter Crockaway under a record marrow before, in a manner of speaking, every August for nine years; this August it buried him in earnest, and the whole village agreed at once that it must have been Sidney Pyne, because that was the loud answer, and the loud answer is so very restful.The Prize Marrow
Eleven seconds of telephone footage had shown the whole of England a man seize a frightened woman, fling her to a railway platform, and step over her and walk away — and the whole of England had tried him, named him, and condemned him before luncheon; so that by the time the Crown of England got round to charging Daniel Quist with assault, there was nothing left to do but the trial, the verdict having been handed down weeks before by a jury of forty thousand strangers who had each seen the same eleven seconds and not one of them the twelfth.The Eleven-Second Man
The store's flawless system said the ring was checked in, logged to his counter, and never logged out — so by the machine's own perfect record only Albert Sturrock could have taken it; and to save him, Fenwick must win the one way he cannot stand, with his junior's data, and supply the one thing no machine has a column for: that the keeper carried a frightened girl's lost heirloom home by hand, off the books, because a lost-property office exists to reunite, not to hoard by the rulebook.The Keeper of the Reunions
A nineteen-year-old Cobb is caught with the dock-workers' burial fund and will not say one word in his own defence — and the silence everyone has read as guilt is in fact the only act of love his family has left, and the one thing standing between the boy and the truth.The Burial Fund
The spectrometer said the wine was a forgery, the master of wine agreed, and a man's life was to be ended over a bottle — and not one of them had thought to ask the only question that matters about a fake, which is who it was made to please.A Question of Vintage
They had her on three cameras, her phone, and a swipe card, which in the modern view is the same as having a confession — and which proves only that the machine saw exactly what she did, and understood nothing whatever about why.The Camera Never Asks Why
There were eight people at the long table the night Aubrey Stint died, and only one of them had spent two years making a perfect little copy of the house — small enough to lie about, too honest to do it.The House That Saw Everything
Nettlecombe had not had a murder in living memory, which was precisely the trouble, because it meant that when one finally arrived nobody recognised it, and they very nearly let it go out with the milk.Lights Out at the Regal
The clocks in Halloran's shop had all stopped at ten to twelve, which made them right twice a day and right about one thing forever, and I stood among them at ten to one being wrong about everything.