One Name Left

CASE 05

The Killer Came Back With Everyone Else

A murder at an island sports meet. Two thousand suspects. You strike them out until one name is left.

An inspector comes to an island sports meet for one reason: to count heads. The head count on the teams’ papers does not match the meal tokens the dining hall takes in. At every meal, the same team comes up two tokens short.

On the first morning, a man is found under the hoist on the storehouse wall. Rain fell in the night, and the yard is wet. Only the ground beneath him is dry.

And in the corner of the yard, a woman lays out pebbles and counts them.

You are the inspector, and your only tools are the island’s own ledgers. The gate ledger. The boatmaster’s fair copy. The muster rolls. The finals results sheet. Ten days of papers, and a roster of two thousand lines. A line is struck for two reasons only: they could not have reached the scene, or someone was watching them the whole time.

The ledgers do not lie. People do. One man’s account of the finals night is false, and the ledgers show it: a bolt, and a clock.

No answer key is printed inside. Days One to Nine each have a check at theonenameleft.com/5, which tells you only whether you are right. When one line is left, the case is not over: the one name left unlocks the ending there, and with it what the woman’s pebbles are counting.

One Name Left, Case File No. 5.

2,000 suspects · ten days · paperback and Kindle

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CASE 04

The Killer Left His Coat on the Hook

Two thousand men work the pit. One of them is a killer. You strike the roster, line by line, until one name is left.

The first snow comes early on this mountain, and then the road closes until the thaw. Nothing comes up and nothing goes down: not the post, not the police, not a man who wants to leave. At the bath keeper’s signal the bar goes on the gate, and it stays on until the lights-out bell.

On the first night a man died in the drying room. He was found at daybreak under a fallen rack, his coat still on its hook. The rope that held the rack had not been cut; someone had taken it off the cleat. The doctor from town would say no more than this: “After the bath keeper’s signal. Before the bell. I cannot say it any closer than that.” The camp called it an accident.

It was not an accident, and it was not the last death. The next man lay face down in the snow on the path between the huts, where everyone walks. No one noticed him for as long as it takes the mess pot to boil twice.

You are the clerk. You do not go down the pit, so you are not on the roster. You carry the camp’s ledgers and copy what you are allowed to copy. Names are scarce here. Numbers are everywhere, and a coat number cannot be taken off.

A line comes off the roster for two reasons only: the man could not get there, or someone was watching him the whole time. Apart from the lines of the dead, nothing else strikes a line. The ledgers do not lie. People do, and a lie shows only when two ledgers are set side by side.

The ten days fall into three parts: the first finds the squads the killer could be in, the second the one squad, the last the name. On the last day, three records are laid over one another before a single line is left.

No answer key is printed inside. Days One to Nine each have a check at theonenameleft.com/4, which tells you only whether you are right. When one line is left, enter the name there. If it is right, the ending unlocks.

Fair play. Each night’s ledgers are copied out in the chapter that uses them, and the full roster is printed in the book.

One Name Left, Case File No. 4.

2,000 suspects · ten days · paperback and Kindle

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CASE 02

The Killer Went the Other Way

The killer never walked out of the building. The killer went the other way: through security. You strike the names out until one is left.

At 06:14 one morning, a cleaner found Hollis Bramfeld face down in a service corridor behind the airport’s check-in hall, dead from a single blow. Bramfeld ran the airport’s property store, the windowless room behind the search lanes where everything taken off a passenger is held, and had no flight to catch that day.

At 06:02 a baggage supervisor had passed Bramfeld at the top of the stairs, said good morning, and got one back.

Every landside way out was watched, and everyone who used one after 06:02 has since been traced and cleared. So the killer took a place in the queue at security, like everybody else, and went on to a gate.

You are the one holding the list. Everyone who cleared security after Bramfeld was last seen alive is printed in the book: 52,000 names, each beside the flight they were booked on. Your tools are a pencil and seventeen clues.

Every clue is true of the killer. Read a clue against a name; if the name fails, strike it. Most of the clues ask about the letters of a name. A few ask about the flight beside it and send you to a timetable of seventy-two departures. Taken together, the seventeen fit no one else in the book.

Twenty minutes at a time, for as long as it takes: this is a book for the arm of a chair, not for a single evening.

No answer key is printed inside. The name is in the list, and nothing around it sets it apart. When you have one name left, check it at theonenameleft.com/2. If it is right, the rest of the story unlocks: why Hollis Bramfeld died.

Fair play. Nothing outside the covers is needed. A clue means exactly what its words say, and where it could be read two ways, it tells you which.

One Name Left, Case File No. 2. Everything you need to play it is inside; Case File No. 1 is not required.

52,000 passengers · 17 clues · paperback

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CASE 01

The Killer Cleared Security

Forty-six thousand people cleared security after Adrian Vane was last seen alive. One of them killed him. You cross them out until one name is left.

At 06:14 on a Tuesday in October, a cleaner found Adrian Vane face down in a service corridor behind the airport’s check-in hall. He was fifty-one, a freight scheduler with nineteen years at the airport, and he was not traveling that day.

At 06:02 a baggage supervisor had passed him at the top of the stairs, said good morning, and got one back. The corridor had one camera, and it had been dark for eleven days. The fault was recorded in the maintenance log. Nobody had read the log since September.

The landside doors, the car parks, the rail platform and the taxi rank were all covered. The killer did not walk out, drive out or take the train. Instead, the killer queued at security like everybody else, put a coat in a tray and walked to a gate.

You hold the pencil, and everything you need is printed in the book. A list of all 46,000 passengers, each beside the flight they were booked on. A timetable of sixty-four departures. And sixteen statements, taken from gate staff, the baggage hall, the reservations office and the airline that ran the flights.

Each statement is true of the killer and settles one small thing: something about the letters of the killer’s name, or about the killer’s flight, its departure time or its aircraft. Read one, cross off every passenger who fails it, and go on to the next.

This is not a puzzle for one evening. It is a book to keep beside your chair and return to, half an hour at a time, over weeks or months.

No answer key is printed inside. Nothing in the list sets the guilty name apart. The last page gives you a first check you can do by hand. Then enter the name at theonenameleft.com. You will be told whether you are right, and if you are, the rest of the story follows: who the killer was, why Adrian Vane died and what the police found afterward.

Fair play. No outside knowledge is needed, and every statement means exactly what it says. Exactly one name survives all sixteen.

One Name Left, Case File No. 1.

46,000 passengers · 16 clues · paperback

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A Marrow & Vine Mystery · Book 1

The Wrong Ambrose Hearne

A bookshop. A ledger. A man who wasn’t who the catalogue said he was.

Bridie Quell spent twenty years correcting other people’s sentences. Then her aunt Vesta died and left her Marrow & Vine, a second-hand bookshop on the square of an English village she had never heard of. With it came thirty-one years of the shop’s buying ledgers, in whose margins Vesta wrote down exactly what she thought of everyone who came through the door.

Bridie has read every line. For stock, she says. Including the one about herself: Quell, B. — Oxford. Corrects other people’s letters for a living. Won’t want a shop. V.

Vesta was wrong about that.

Among the stock are fourteen books Vesta bought in March 1995 and never sold. Bridie has put them into the village auction, and in the catalogue, in her own hand, she expanded her aunt’s entry — Hearne, A. — to the only Hearne she knew: From the library of Ambrose Hearne, 1995.

On the night of the auction preview, a dealer who signed in as Ambrose Hearne is found dead on the stockroom floor beneath the gallery, the shop’s ladder across his back. The inspector says he fell. The pathologist says he was on the floor before the ladder came down. The village has already decided who did it — the dealer from out of town who has been telling the pub, loudly, where he was that night — and does not care to be asked again. Bridie, who believes only what is written down, is not so sure.

She does not go to doors. She reads paper. Callum, her seventeen-year-old Saturday boy, walks the village, reports back, and tells her when she is guessing (‘That’s not evidence. That’s a mood.’). Dawn, who runs the till and has no time for books, keeps the shop open and Bridie fed. And Bridie sits under her aunt’s lamp with the fire officer’s book, a builder’s written statement, thirty-one ledgers and a pencil, and crosses names off one at a time.

Seven names. Six of them went out of her door without anyone seeing them go. One of them may never have left.

And in the 1995 ledger, beside those fourteen books, her aunt has inked over the seller’s name so heavily that it came through the other side of the page.

Fair play, a very English village, a warm and dry sense of humour, and a cat that is not the shop’s. Everything Bridie has, you have. You may get there before she does. She would rather you didn’t.

A novel · paperback now · Kindle edition October 16, 2026

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A Marrow & Vine Mystery · Book 2

A Line Struck Through

A bonfire. A proof page. A name with a line through it.

Every Bonfire Night, Wychcombe wheels a stuffed guy down to the fire in the village Trust’s old hand-cart, and two hundred-odd people cheer when the sheet comes off.

This year the guy in the chair is Roland Askew, who chaired the Trust for fifteen years. He has not been stuffed.

Marrow & Vine is seeing the Trust’s centenary history through the press, and Bridie Quell has been proofing it batch by batch since September. So when Detective Sergeant Ankerdine lays a scrap torn from one of those proofs on the counter, a single line from the Trust’s old meeting minutes with Askew’s name struck out in a proofreader’s mark, the sergeant wants to know whose mark it is. She also wants Bridie to go on reading every piece of paper she brings.

Bridie says no. The Trust is her customer, and she has a shop to keep.

The village has its answer already: Warren Tull, who shouted at Askew in the Bell, the village pub, in October.

Callum, eighteen now and taking a year out, walks the lanes and brings back what he sees. Dawn keeps the till, keeps Bridie fed, and says what she thinks in as few words as will do it. Down the lane at the Grange, the care home where Bridie reads to eleven old people on Tuesday evenings, Edith Pendle has had a letter every week since April in the handwriting of her husband, who died in 2021. And somebody keeps seeing a light in a Grange window. Bridie does not believe in that sort of thing. She would still rather not walk past it after dark.

Then comes Remembrance Sunday, and a second scrap of the same line.

The torn line leads back to one Saturday afternoon in 1986, in the village hall, and to a minute book that says it was warmly received.

A Line Struck Through is the second Marrow & Vine Mystery, and a fine place to start: fair play, a very English November, a warm and dry sense of humour, a detective sergeant who will not take off her coat, and a cat that, whatever it thinks, is not the shop’s. Everything Bridie has, you have. You may get there before she does.

A novel · Kindle edition and paperback October 30, 2026

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