Twelve Impossible Murders

By Cordelia Ashworth

Twelve cases. Twelve locked rooms, unbreakable alibis, and impossible deaths. And a detective who used to build illusions for a living, now spending her retirement taking them apart.

Cordelia Kestrel spent twenty years as a stage magician before an accident sent her into a different trade: proving that what looks impossible never actually was. Insurers, defence barristers, and one reluctant police inspector call her in when a case has no solution - a lighthouse keeper found dead behind a bolted door with the great lamp still turning, an alibi backed by ten thousand live radio listeners, a woman who vanishes from one locked sleeping-car compartment and turns up dead in another that was locked too.

Narrated by her friend and chronicler Sam Okafor, this casebook collects twelve fair-play mysteries in the classic tradition - every clue shown to the reader before the reveal, every impossibility given a physical, human explanation. No withheld evidence. No last-page tricks. Just twelve sealed rooms, and a woman who knows exactly how a sealed room is built.

Readers who love Agatha Christie's short mysteries, Chesterton's Father Brown, the puzzle-box precision of John Dickson Carr, or the modern fair-play revival of Anthony Horowitz and Knives Out will feel right at home.

But Kestrel does not always win. Twice in this volume, the case closes without a name, without a confession, and without certainty - an honest reminder that some doors, however hard you push, stay shut.

Twelve impossible murders. Ten solved. Two that never let her sleep again.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8HX4TPK
• ISBN13: 9798186767220
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"