Run: 2026-10-27-01M5YEDA66CG58VTTM5E9XA2M7

The first snow began falling as Detective Mara Vale arrived at Blackthorn Hall, summoned by a telephone call before dawn. Inside, the grandfather clock had stopped at midnight, though its pendulum still swung above a dark, spreading pool of blood. Its owner, the celebrated novelist Julian Blackthorn, lay beneath it, wearing evening clothes and an expression of almost comical surprise. Mara knelt beside him and noticed a chess piece clutched in his left hand, a white queen carved from ivory. The household gathered in the doorway: a widow, two sons, a housekeeper, and a guest nobody would identify by name. Each claimed to have slept through the night, yet someone had carefully polished the bloodstained floor around the dead body. On the mantel, an unopened envelope bore her name in the dead man’s unmistakable handwriting, dated exactly three days earlier. When she opened it, a single sentence confronted her: “I already know which of them will kill me here tonight.”