Sudoktive: Detective Sudoku

Two detective cases where the puzzles are not a break from the investigation. They are the investigation. A cryptographer is dead in a study locked from the inside. An insurance inspector finds a chart of a bay that does not exist — it did once, and somebody spent fifty-two years taking it off the map. THE INVESTIGATION BOARD Your case is a corkboard of pinned photographs joined by red string. Solve a lead and the leads behind it come out of the dark. Some threads run parallel for a while, then reconverge on a deduction you cannot reach until you have worked more than one angle. Nothing arrives in order. PUZZLES THAT ARE ACTUALLY GRADED Counting givens is a poor measure of difficulty — a grid with forty clues can be harder than one with thirty. These are sorted by the techniques a solve genuinely requires, checked before they ship, and drawn by band rather than fixed per lead. Replay a…