‘Murdoku’ arrives, the mystery that transforms the reader into a detective

Written by the Canadian puzzler Manuel Garand, “Murdoku. 80 mysterious murders to be solved with logic” (Magazzini Salani, 208 pages, €14.90) offers eighty cases of increasing difficulty set in the most disparate places: a bank, a casino, an opera house, a chess tournament and many other settings rich in detail. Each setting becomes a small investigative universe in which nothing is left to chance.

The game mechanics are immediate but extremely refined. The reader has a grid, a list of characters and a series of clues. By applying the fundamental rule of sudoku – each character can occupy only one position in each row and column – it is possible to reconstruct the movements of the suspects until identifying who was in the same room as the victim at the time of the crime. This is precisely the key to unmasking the murderer.

The strength of the volume lies in the balance between accessibility and depth. The first puzzles allow you to familiarize yourself with the method, while the subsequent cases require increasingly more complex deductions, without ever being frustrating. Each solution rewards pure reasoning, without relying on chance or arbitrary intuition. In recent years, the publishing market has seen growing interest in books that actively involve the reader. Escape books, narrative puzzles, investigative games and interactive volumes have conquered an increasingly wider range of audiences, demonstrating how reading can become a participatory experience. “Murdoku” fits into this trend, but does so with a new formula that manages to stand out thanks to the contamination between the language of crime and that of mathematical logic.

It is no coincidence that the series has already achieved considerable international success, entering the charts of numerous countries and attracting both detective story fans and puzzle lovers. The book, in fact, does not require particular mathematical skills: what matters is the ability to observe, eliminate impossible hypotheses and build the solution step by step. The graphic aspect also contributes to involvement. The colorful illustrations of crime scenes transform each page into a small investigative theater, helping the reader to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the case. The visual component is not only decorative, but accompanies the deductive process making the experience more intuitive and immersive.

Behind this original invention is Manuel Garand, a Canadian author originally from Montreal and creator of logic games also published by the “Financial Times”. For years, Garand has been developing puzzles that combine mathematical elegance and fun, refining an approach that always puts the reader at the center of the experience. The author himself tells how his first and most severe “collaborators” are his wife Cindy and their two children, tireless testers of the puzzles that gradually take shape. For those who love to test their intuition, follow clues to the last deduction and experience the satisfaction of unmasking the culprit without relying on luck, “Murdoku” offers a challenge as engaging as it is intelligent. A book that demonstrates how, even in the world of crime, the true protagonist can be reasoning. (by Paolo Martini)