One Name Left: Nobody Left the Train

Nobody left the train. So one of them did it.

The Meridian Express runs three days and two nights, and the doors stay sealed between stations. When something happens aboard, the guilty party is still on board. You have the passenger list, and you have what the crew noticed. That is enough.

Twenty cases, and every one of them ends on a single name

Each case gives you a roster of suspects and a short set of clues. Every clue is true. Cross out the passengers who cannot fit and keep going until one name is left. The first case is a five-clue warm-up with twenty-two suspects. The last is eleven clues and forty-eight.

Every puzzle in this book was checked by computer

All 149 clues were tested against all 672 suspects by a solver written separately from the program that built the puzzles. Two things are true of every case here. Exactly one suspect survives all the clues. And no clue is filler: remove any single clue and more than one suspect survives.

If you have ever finished one of these books and found names left over that no clue accounted for, that is the problem this one was built to solve.

A rule-out grid for every case

Most books hand you a wall of names and wish you luck. This one gives you a grid first: strike a value the moment a clue kills it, then sweep the roster once. It is how these puzzles are actually solved, and no other book in this corner gives you the tool.

What is inside

• 20 cases across one train, from a theft in the pantry car to a murder in the long tunnel.
• 672 suspects in all, and every one of them is a real candidate until a clue rules them out.
• A short story with every case. Not a bare list of names: a crime, a setting, and a reason to care who did it.
• Room to write on the page. Working notes on every case, not a cramped margin.
• Full solutions at the back, never printed on a facing page where your eye can catch them.
• No arithmetic anywhere. Not one clue asks you to add, count or calculate.

8.5 by 11 inches, 92 pages, printed large enough to read and wide enough to write in.