Artifacts, Alibis, and Aftermath

Four true-crime puzzles. Four ordinary narrators. One ruthless truth: crimes don’t start with a scream, they start with a story that won’t match the record.

In this cold-case-inspired compilation, a museum docent proves a legendary coin theft couldn’t happen the way the night log insists. A conservator reconstructs a high-profile jewel heist minute by minute, discovering that “malfunction” is sometimes just a softer word for “window.” A university administrator watches a prestige lie collapse under routine credential verification, then realizes her email has become a timestamp in a murder timeline. A PTA treasurer follows a trail of “ordinary” purchases and curated updates until a community’s whispers harden into a docket number.

Told in first-person, conversational prose, each story plants fair-play clues early, logs, invoices, maintenance gaps, message chains, so readers can solve the core contradiction before the official record catches up. Names and locations are fictionalized for privacy, but the investigative spine stays true to publicly documented cases: how evidence accumulates, how narratives fracture, and how accountability finally arrives.