Cora Felton, the Puzzle Lady (who actually couldn't solve a crossword puzzle to save her life), is surprisingly good at sudoku, so it's no problem when a Japanese publisher asks her to write a sudoku book. But when two Japanese publishers show up in Bakerhaven to vie for her services, Cora is a little confused. Which one did she actually sign with? Which one has the stunning geisha wife? And which one is about to be arrested for murder? The two men are archenemies and will go to great lengths to ace out each other. But would they stoop to murder? Someone is littering the town with sudoku, crossword puzzles, and dead private eyes. It's up to Cora, with the help of her niece, Sherry, to solve the puzzle, the sudoku, and the murder, before the killer strikes again.
Parnell Hall delivers another entertaining, puzzle-packed adventure with his delightfully untraditional sleuth in The Sudoku Puzzle Murders, featuring for the first time sudoku puzzles by New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz.
Release date:
April 15, 2008
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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Chapter 1
Cora Felton gripped the black marker firmly in her right hand and stepped up to the easel in the front of the Bakerhaven, Connecticut, town hall. On the white board was a giant square. Thick, black lines in the shape of a tic-tac-toe divided it into nine smaller squares. Thinner black lines divided each in turn into nine even smaller squares. In some of these squares, numerals from 1 through 9 had been entered, one number per square.
A sudoku.
In the back of the crowded town hall, Aaron Grant, just in from the airport, stashed his suitcase behind the door, and scanned the rows of seats for Sherry Carter. She had to be there. Cora Felton, the much vaunted Puzzle Lady, who hawked breakfast cereal to children in TV ads, was merely a figurehead, a kindly, grandmotherly face to adorn the nationally syndicated crossword puzzle column. Sherry actually created the puzzles. Cora could neither construct nor solve a crossword puzzle if her life depended on it. Only a handful of people knew the secret. Cora was always running the risk of being exposed as a fake. Without Sherry, she was lost.
But Cora's niece wasn't there.
Becky Baldwin, easily Bakerhaven's attorney most likely to be mistaken for a Gap dancer, waved him over.
"Where's Sherry?" Aaron whispered, sliding into a seat next to her.
She shrugged. Becky used to date Aaron, and still bristled at the name of her rival.
"She isn't here?"
"Haven't seen her."
"Strange," Aaron said. He wondered how Cora was going to get through. The Puzzle Lady's presentations were usually like a marionette act, with Sherry pulling the strings.
Cora glanced at the board, then back at her audience. "Ladies and gentlemen, for the two percent of you who have never seen one of these, this is a sudoku. For the ten percent of you who don't know how to solve one, I'm going to show you."
Cora turned to the puzzle. She knew exactly how to explain it, because Sherry had drilled it into her head the night before. "As I'm sure you know, the sudoku is a puzzle in which the numbers one through nine appear once and only once in every row and column. The numbers also appear once and only once in the nine boxes of each three-by-three square." Cora pointed them out. "There are nine three-by-three squares in the puzzle.
"A sudoku starts with some of the numbers filled in." Cora pointed to the blackboard. "This is an easy sudoku. At least, I hope it is, because I'm going to show you how to solve it."
"Look at the three-by-three square in the upper left hand corner. There's a two, a three, and a four in that square. See if you can figure out where to put a seven."
Several hands went up. Someone yelled, "Above the four."
Cora smiled. "I see most of you already know. That's right, a seven goes in the box in the first row across and the third column down. And why does it go there? It can't go in the first column, because there's a seven in the fourth row of that column, and you can't have two sevens in the same column. And it can't go in the second column, because there's a seven in the ninth row of that column. So it must be in the third column. The box in the second row of that column is already filled with a four. The box in the third row is already filled with a three. So the only place it can go is the box in the first row of the third column."
Cora curtsied and gestured in the direction of the person who shouted. "Which is the box above the four.
"Using the same sort of logic, we can figure out where the rest of the numbers go."
Cora quickly filled in the rest of the puzzle. She flashed her trademark Puzzle Lady smile. "And that," she said, "is how you solve a sudoku."
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