About
M.W. Riddle writes puzzle mysteries in which nobody hands you the answer.
The two kinds of book
Word Search Whodunits give you a scene and a grid. Find every word on the list, and the letters you never circled spell out a fact about the crime. Five puzzles make a case, eight cases make a volume. There is a Jr. line for ages 8 to 12, built the same way with larger grids and shorter cases.
The 50,000-Suspect Cases work differently. One crime, a register of fifty thousand names, and eighteen clues. Cross out everyone the clues rule out and a single name is left standing. No trivia, no guessing, and no luck.
Why the answer is not in the back
A printed answer page sits under your thumb the whole time you work. It is not that anybody would cheat. It is that a page you can flip to at a weak moment is a different thing from a page that does not exist.
So the elimination books print no answer key. When you have your name, you enter it here and find out at once whether you are right. If you are not, you are told exactly which clues rule your name out, so you can see where the trail went cold instead of just being told no.
How the puzzles are checked
Every case is generated and then proved by code that shares nothing with the code that built it. A case has to have exactly one answer, and no clue may be a shortcut that collapses the puzzle in one stroke. A case that fails either test is thrown away rather than printed.
The registry names are drawn at random from public records of given names. Every one of them belonged to somebody once, and none of them belongs to anybody in these books.