A Most Puzzling Murder
Bianca Marais
On Sale Date: June 10, 2025
9780778368601, 0778368602
Trade Paperback
$19.99 USD, $23.99 CAD
Fiction / Myster & Detective
480 pages
About the Book:
Interspersed with riddles and puzzles that both
Destiny and the reader must solve, A Most Puzzling Murder is a
one-of-a-kind mystery that will leave you guessing and gasping until the very
last page!
Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very,
very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s
content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the
position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for
the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first
place!
She decodes the invitation's hidden message with ease, and its promise to
reveal her family secrets proves too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny,
who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are
almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves
turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected
by their mistrust for one another.
Their newly arrived guest proves to be just as much an enigma to them as they
are to her. While Destiny slowly works to unravel the mysteries hidden
throughout the ominous castle, she struggles to interpret disturbing nightly
visions of what is to come. In the midst of cryptic ciphers, hidden passages,
and the family’s magical line of succession, Destiny is certain of two things:
one of the Scruffmores is going to die and she’s running out of time to stop
it.
About the Author:
BIANCA MARAIS cohosts the popular podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers get published. She teaches creative writing through the podcast and was named a winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto, where she loves playing escape-room games and writing about strong female protagonists.
Social Links:
Author website: https://www.biancamarais.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/biancamaraisauthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/biancam_author/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/biancamarais_author/
Buy Links:
Amazon:
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& Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-most-puzzling-murder-bianca-marais/1146847363
Bookshop:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-most-peculiar-tale-indeed-original-bianca-marais/21435438
Books-A-Million:
https://www.booksamillion.com/p/9780778368601
Kobo:
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-most-puzzling-murder
AppleBooks:
https://books.apple.com/us/book/a-most-puzzling-murder/id6501987778
Google
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Target: https://www.target.com/p/a-most-puzzling-murder-by-bianca-marais/-/A-93112360
EXCERPT:
CHAPTER 1
Destiny
Sunday, 9:57 a.m.
Destiny Whip warily eyes her bedside table,
thinking how it could easily be mistaken for a miniature graveyard, what with
all the little pills neatly lined in staggered rows, positioned upright like
tiny headstones. It certainly feels as though she’s regarding the burial ground
of her hopes and dreams, haunted by the specter of the enormous potential
she’s so dismally failed to live up to.
When you’re declared a child prodigy,
everyone expects you to go far in life, but all Destiny has managed today is a
slow shuffle to and from the bathroom. Even that required Herculean reserves
of energy.
Balancing her laptop on her knees, she
reaches to the farthest side of the bed for her emotional-support urn, pulling
it close and tucking it into her armpit as though cuddling a teddy bear. She
kisses the top of the teardrop shape, the metal cold against her chapped lips.
Bex appears in Destiny’s doorway, leaning
her head against the frame. “Good morning.”
Her best friend is still too scrawny, but
not nearly as emaciated as she was a year ago when all she feasted on was
beauty magazines and models’ Instagram pages rather than anything resembling
food. Bex looks mostly healthy again, her long chestnut hair gleaming, the
hollows of her cheeks no longer reminiscent of sinkholes.
“You okay?” Bex asks, the corners of her
mouth turned down.
It’s the anniversary of the accident today,
one year somehow crawling by on scraped knees.
Some people act like severe depression is a
tarnish, one that can be polished off with the application of enough elbow
grease. Luckily, Bex isn’t one of them.
Destiny tries to speak, but a knot of
regret is so tangled up in her throat that the words don’t stand a chance.
Her laptop suddenly squawks with an
incoming video call. In the months that Destiny has been seeing Dr. Shepherd,
they’ve never once had a virtual consultation over a weekend. But today is
going to be a tough one, which is why the psychiatrist insisted on the
appointment.
As the ringing continues, Destiny gently
places the urn beside her and instinctively reaches for her notebook before
paging to the list of tasks the doctor assigned last month.
Bex sidles up next to her, reading over her
shoulder.
1. Leave the apartment once a day to go for
a walk or grab a coffee.
2. Reach out to an old friend or colleague
to suggest a meetup.
3. Replace all the dead plants.
4. Keep a dream journal about the
white-haired ghost woman.
5. Email the council expressing your wish
to return.
6. Accept one of the consultancies that
you’ve been offered (one that doesn’t require travel).
7. Work on forgiving Nate.
8. Limit your interactions with Bex.
Bex side-eyes the last item on the list.
“Rude,” she huffs. “You’d think I was a bad inf luence or something.”
Rather than answering Bex or the incoming
call, Destiny thinks of how she’s never f lunked an assignment in her entire
life. Always top of her class, and despite being admitted to university as a
twelve-year-old, Destiny cannot fathom this degree of failure.
She’s ticked nothing off the list, not even
throwing away the plants whose shriveled corpses goad her, their untimely
deaths undoubtedly due to the curtains constantly being drawn tight. That, and
Destiny forgetting to water them.
The laptop’s ringing grates on Destiny’s
nerves, but she can’t force herself to answer and face Dr. Shepherd’s
disappointment. It will be carefully concealed, of course, with the
psychiatrist gently pointing out there’s always next week, or the week after
that, to achieve these seemingly simple goals. But it doesn’t matter how much
of an extension Destiny is given.
It’s no use.
For how can she possibly cut ties with Bex,
who’s her dearest, not to mention only, friend?
Plus, there’s no way the Council of
Enigmatologists will take her back after she’s been AWOL for so long. Each time
an envelope drops through the mail slot, Destiny fully expects it to be a
letter informing her that they’ve completely revoked her membership. It hurts
to remember how thrilled she was to be appointed president of the prestigious
group just thirteen months ago, and how she, Bex, and Nate all splurged on a
fancy dinner to celebrate.
When the call finally drops, Bex exhales, a
long whoosh of defeat. “I know I shouldn’t enable you with all the talking, but
it’s not like I can call anyone on your behalf.”
They both look down at the wallpaper on the
home screen of Destiny’s laptop.
It’s a photo that was taken thirteen years
ago when Destiny was eight. In it, her mother’s arm is f lung across Annie’s
shoulders, happiness radiating from the two best friends in waves. Destiny’s
eyes fill with tears as she studies her mother’s straight black hair and pale
skin, and those enormous glasses obscuring most of her face.
Jutting her chin at Destiny’s mother, Bex
murmurs, “I wish I’d known Liz.”
Destiny nods before turning her attention
to Annie, with her striking Afro and beaded shoulder-duster earrings, and her
smile as bright as the sun.
The image was captured two weeks before Liz
died. A year later, the paperwork went through to officially make Annie
Destiny’s second adoptive mother. Their deaths were a wrenching loss, a
tearing in the fabric of Destiny’s being that she never quite stitched back
together.
There were times in the before when
Destiny experienced the sting of loneliness, that awful yearning of the one
forever stuck outside, nose and palms pressed against the cold glass, gazing
in at what belonging looked like: foreheads bent together, raucous laughter
elicited by inside jokes, sentences finished by those who knew you best.
But this is not loneliness, in the same way
that a drop of water is not a deluge, the way a sigh is not a hurricane.
“I’m so sorry that you’re having such a
rough time of it,” Bex says, reaching out to tuck a f laming red curl behind
Destiny’s ear. She freezes upon seeing Destiny’s expression, her hand hovering
like a ghost between them. “A year is a long time, though, and Dr. Shepherd is
right despite the fact that she clearly has it in for me. You need to move on.”
God, that Bex is apologizing to her,
of all people, when everything that happened was Destiny’s fault.
“No, I’m sorry,” Destiny says, her
voice pulled so taut that it snaps. Seeing the pills all standing to
attention—no longer a cemetery full of headstones, but rather an army ready to
fight the last battle—Destiny reaches for the urn again, stroking it like a
security blanket. “If you stop talking to me, Bex, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“Not gonna happen,” Bex replies breezily.
And then more firmly she says, “Okay, it’s tough love time. You seriously need
to shower because you’re stinking up the place. Plus, the kitchen needs
cleaning. Those take-out containers have grown thumbs. I swear I caught them trying
to hitch a ride to the nearest primordial swamp.”
Destiny laughs at how incredibly bossy Bex
is.
Especially for a dead person.
Still, it’s reassuring that no matter how
much has changed, some things stay exactly the same.
Excerpted from A Most
Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais, Copyright © 2025 by Bianca Marais. Published by MIRA Books.
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