The Lark & Quill Casebook

Your late aunt's bookshop is yours now. The front door sticks unless you lift the key first, and on your second morning a rare-book dealer is dead in the back room. You are not the police. You are an editor, and noticing what does not match was your whole former life.

You are Helen Brig, thirty-four, up from Boston to run the Lark & Quill in Heddleford, Vermont. The shop has a bay-windowed front room, a mid room shelved by your Aunt Eleanor's arguments rather than the alphabet, her office, the Folio room at the back and a flat upstairs. Across the green are Fran's diner, Sam Hewitt's bakery, Tom Goss's hardware store, Doreen Clay's inn and the station, where Sheriff Hugh Kline would like you to leave his tape alone. Pepper, the long-haired grey shop cat, sits on whatever matters.

Every day starts at the shop. In the morning you open at nine and find the right book for customers who ask in their own words; while the tape is up, the town comes to the glass instead, with scones, casseroles and theories. In the afternoon you cross the green to three doors of your choice; in the evening you sort the day at the kitchen table. Look at a room, look twice at what catches you, and turn things over when they have a back. What you hear goes in your notebook in pencil. It becomes ink only when it has a time on it and a second source who did not hear it from the first. Only ink goes to the sheriff.

The Match is your editor's eye: put two cards side by side, a shelf list and a photograph, a witness's time and a camera frame, and see what agrees and what does not. Each case ends at Hugh's table. You lay five cards in a row under WHO, WHAT, WHY, HOW and WHEN, and Hugh reads from the left and stops at the first card that does not hold. Helen never accuses, chases or arrests anyone. A row that stops early sends you back to look again, and no case can be lost.

Volume One holds three cases, one for each of the first three books, on the books' autumn calendar: A Killer Between the Pages, Dead on Arrival (Mail) and The Quilted Alibi. A shop day takes about half an hour, a case three to four hours and the whole game eight to ten. It is single-player, in painted 2D, for mouse or controller. There is no timed input, every colour clue carries its name, and Pepper's hints can be turned off.

Between cases the shop comes back to life. Regulars return with more to say, the window changes with the season, and the casebook fills with the objects you found and the row that held. Each case also leaves one card about Aunt Eleanor's death in a folder you mark LATER, and the folder stays open. There is no daily login, no streak and no timer: the game waits on the counter until you come back.

The game is based on The Lark & Quill Mysteries, a cozy mystery series written to fair-play rules. It uses only the first three books, keeps their solutions, their town and their slow burn as written, and takes nothing from later books. The romance stays closed-door, as in the books: no kiss and no romance meter.

The Lark & Quill Casebook is a complete game design for PC. Development has not started.