One of These Cars Killed Her: Dallas, by James R. Baldwin

Dallas · Case File Five

One of These Cars Killed Her

A Murder Mystery Elimination Puzzle Book
48,600 Plates · 11 Clues · One Car

Forty-eight thousand six hundred license plates. Eleven clues. One of them killed her.

Nora Venn knew how to make a pavement repair last. She could tell where a patch would fail before the broken piece came out, and she made the new people stop and look.

On a July morning she was inside a closed work zone on US 75 in Dallas, checking the edge of a repair. A southbound car left the traffic lane, crossed the buffer and struck her. It pulled back into traffic, took the exit and kept going.

Nobody had put a reader on that road to catch a crime. A traffic study for a planned exit redesign was recording the mainline and the ramp that day, and the ramp reader caught the departing car's rear plate. What survives is the study's full-day record: every registration it saw, once each.

Every one of them is printed in this book.

You do not need the earlier case files to solve this one.

How it works

  • Read the eleven clues. Each one is a fact about the car's plate.
  • Take one clue at a time and cross out every plate that fails it.
  • Work the clues in whatever order you like. The answer is the same either way.
  • Exactly one plate survives all eleven. Remove any single clue and more than one does.

One case, not forty puzzles

This is a single investigation that runs the length of the book, not a stack of short puzzles you finish and forget. Work it across as many sessions as you want, with nothing more than a pencil.

Inside

  • 48,600 license plates across 200 sheets, every one unique
  • The eleven clues, printed twice so you can work from either end
  • Three exhibits from the case file and a closing case note, spliced through the export
  • 200 things about Dallas most visitors never learn, one under every sheet
  • The verdict in a shift code, and the plate in plain type at the very back for anyone who would rather just know

Fair play throughout. No clue depends on anything outside this book, and nothing is hidden.

A murder mystery elimination puzzle book. Case File Five.