Return to Sender

In the basement of a fog-bound port city's General Post Office, beneath pavement lights where the boots of the city pass all day, is the room where every letter that could not be delivered ends up.

Thea Pell has read them for eighteen years. She is the Returns Room's Senior Blind Reader: she can find the house a smudged address meant, the hand behind a forged signature, the lie inside a refusal slip. Paper does not lie, she says. People lie on paper.

This autumn the dead letters begin to answer back. A pawnbroker's notices are refused three times. A parcel weighs too little. A registered letter vanishes from a locked cage. A dying woman's last letter arrives in eleven pieces. And between the cases, four unsigned letters reach Room 9, all of them about a warehouse fire thirty-six years ago — and the last of them is addressed to Thea herself.

Return to Sender is an illustrated detective puzzle book of twelve interlocking cases. Each one gives you the evidence Thea has — envelopes, postmarks, logbooks, timetables, torn letters — and asks you to reach the one answer the paper allows before you turn to her solution. Hints in three steps, full reasoning, and a mystery that runs from the first page to the last.

For readers of classic fair-play detection, period puzzles and cosy-gothic mysteries. You need nothing but the book, a pencil and the patience of a clerk.