The Clockmaker's Last Hour

The hands read twenty-three minutes to five. They are lying. > Silas Rendell kept the turret clock of Marlow Bridge for forty-one years. On a Tuesday morning in October 1938 he is found dead at the top of the tower, the workshop door bolted on the inside, and the clock stopped at a time that cannot be right. > You are the locum coroner's officer, sent from the county town with three days and a satchel of papers. The coroner sits on Monday and he will want four things: who, when, how and why. > Rendell never wrote anything in words. For forty-one years he kept his commissions, his debts and his grudges in the only notation he trusted — tooth counts, chime patterns, engraving grids and short riddles cut into the backplates of the clocks he sold. To read his papers at all, you must do what he did. That is why every puzzle in this book is a piece of evidence, and not one of them is decoration. > Inside: > - Twelve chapters, each ending in one fact for your case notebook - Sixty puzzles: gear ratios, count wheels, pre-decimal money, ciphers, logic grids, word ladders and twelve verse riddles - Twelve drawn exhibits — the tower in section, the town, the movement, the ledger, the oil book, the indenture, the certificate - Seven rules of fair play, printed before chapter one and kept - Hints in three levels for every puzzle, shuffled with an index so your eye cannot catch the next answer - A coroner's return to fill in, and then the full solution > Everything you need is printed inside. Nothing turns on knowledge you would have to look up.

The narrator does not lie to you. The suspects may, and two of them do.