Last month, A. Carver published the fifth title in the Alex Corby and Cornelia Crow series, entitled Death in 13 Rooms (2026), which is a collection of previously unpublished short stories that has, sort of, been foreshadowed in previous novels – teasing comments about cases like "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." Fans of the series will be glad to see Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia front and center of these thirteen short stories. Cornelia was sorely missed in The Dry Diver Drownings (2024) and Hangings at Hempel's Green (2025) was pretty much a standalone mystery that happened to feature Alex and Cornelia. They're back, front and center, picking apart and dispelling thirteen locked room mysteries and other crimes of the impossible variety.
First things, first. Death in 13 Rooms has a brief "Author's Note" noting that "the following stories are presented in the order they were written." So the stories improve as Carver gets a hang of the short story format, because that's a bit of different game than the tightly-plotted, fairly clued and novel-length locked room extravaganzas of The Author is Dead (2022) and The Christmas Miracle Crimes (2023). What's also worth mentioning as a sign of the time is that the standard legal disclaimer now includes "no generative artificial intelligence was used in the making of this book, nor any previous books by this author" beside the usual this is a work of fiction and resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Now, onto the stories!
The second story, "The Knife in the Devil's Throat," was referenced in Hangings at Hempel's Green as the first time Alex and Cornelia crossed paths with Detective Inspector Peveril. Their first meeting happens when a rescue mission turns into a homicide investigation. Four school girls and their teacher found themselves trapped by rising floodwaters in the Devil's Throat cave and a team of expert divers were assembled to get them out, but, when they divers returned for the last time to get the teacher, they return to his bloodied corpse. However, none of the four girls could have cut his throat as they were all sedated as they were rescued one by one. And no weapon was found on either the girls or inside the cave and flooded passage. Alex has been following the news as one of the girls is an old school friend and, when her great-aunt smells an inexplicable crime, they're on the case.
This story has a lot of going for itself, a disaster/survival mystery in a miniature, but hated the solution for the vanishing knife and shockingly unoriginal coming from Carver – who has been everything but unoriginal in explaining miracles. A type of vanishing-trick I simply detest as a solution for disappearing weapons and other items. No matter how it's dressed up and presented, but the who, why and circumstances in which the murder makes for a fascinatingly good and modern detective story. Just not a very good locked room mystery.
The third story, "Where the Crows Gather," returns to form as Alex and Cornelia are out and about again when they meet a police officer asking then if they're "here for the murder." The murder in question is that of Professor Pierre Surrey and appears to have been the victim of a blade-wielding fiend, "some are calling him the Night Ripper," who chased the professor up to his front door, killed him and disappeared without ever showing up on the CCTV footage. Cornelia's obsession with impossible crimes rivals my own and jumps on the opportunity to tackle this apparently invisible killer. She and Alex, of course, succeed in doing so and liked the solution tying the invisible attacker roaming the neighborhood with the apparent inexplicable murder of the professor. A short, simple and satisfying story.
By the way, nearly every story in Death in 13 Rooms either has a diagram, floor plan or even the odd family tree, but "Where the Crows Gather" has a grainy, timestamped frame from the CCTV footage – showing nothing more than an empty front garden. Maybe a small, unimportant detail, but a detail that tells there's now such a thing as a 21st century locked room mystery.
Next up is "Vote for Murder" and has Alex accompanying Cornelia to the polling station, a school building, to cast her vote in mayoral race between Andrew Stilldare and Geoffrey Uppermere. When they arrive at the polling station, Alex and Cornelia find that the two candidates are also there to cast their votes. Stilldare and Uppermere banter a bit and the former disappears behind the curtain of the small, crammed voting booth. Shortly after a thock is heard as Stilldare toppled out of the voting booth with "an arrow buried in the centre of his forehead." So with Alex and Cornelia sitting right there when the murder happened, they piece together how someone could have fired an arrow inside "a space no larger than a phonebox." The impossible murder here is very reminiscent of Edward D. Hoch's "The Problem of the Voting Booth" (1977), but Carver had a far superior solution to this conundrum.
Only drawback of "Vote for Murder" is that the locked room is so tight, and the murder so specific, there's only one way it could have been done. Other than that, another good and solid locked room mystery.
"The Second Problem of the Potting Shed," one of the collection's shortest story, makes it abundantly clear Carver had been reading Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne series when writing this and the previous story. Hoch's "The Problem of the Potting Shed" (2000), collected in Challenge the Impossible (2018), is one of my top 10 Dr. Hawthorne stories and Carver picked up the gauntlet to provide an alternative solution to the problem of a body inside a locked garden shed. Carver's story begins with someone complaining to Alex and Cornelia about their neighbors potting shed, which has two major problems. Firstly, the potting shed is an eyesore and, secondly, that their neighbor is lying dead inside – "none of us can understand quite how it happened." The potting shed has a single, fixed window and the door "crudely locked by winding a length of string around a pair of hooks set in the door and doorframe." So how could the murderer have escaped from this locked shed? Like I said, this is one of the shortest stories here and therefore less complicated than other, but very much appreciated Carver's practical, cleverly clued approach on how to leave a body inside a locked shed. Hoch would have approved!
The sixth story, "The Suicide Selfie Curse," is both longer than the previous stories and one of my favorites from this collection. A story that can be seen a companion piece to The Dry Diver Drownings.
Alex and Cornelia have started to become known enough as amateur detectives that sometimes a problem is brought to them, instead of being drawn to them like the murder magnets they are. This time, Alex's attention is drawn to the tragic deaths of two internet personalities, Melanie "Melodramassacre" Douro and Roshni "Roshni Relates" Patil – respectively a horror streamer and true crime podcaster. Melodramassacre was the first to die when she visited a secluded tower, Hopeloss Monument, standing on a wooded hilltop inside a small clearing. She took a selfie on the tower's stone balcony and fell to her death. Roshni Relates, the second victim, had came to the tower to do a piece on Melodramassacre's death, but she suffered the same fate as she fell to her death following a selfie. What's more, there are witnesses who believe the girls were shoved to their death by something invisible.
It goes without saying Cornelia pricks up at the prospect of an intangible killer shoving people from a tower, but Alex is more reserved and reluctant "to just go hassling poor bereaved strangers from out of the blue." She's overruled by Cordelia, but not without consequences. Firstly, they get to witness the third victim plunge to her death and get to confirm the tower is empty. Secondly, Alex beats Cornelia to the correct solution and now Cornelia has to sit back trying to figure out what Alex spotted that she has missed. So, character-wise, “The Suicide Selfie Curse” is treat for everyone who missed Alex, Cornelia and their interactions, but Carver also presented an interesting new variation on the death by defenestration from a locked room conceit with the last sentence revealing the method. Not to mention a very effectively done scene revealing the murderer. "The Suicide Selfie Curse" is an impossible crime story for the 21st century and a fine, anthology worthy impossible crime story at that.
The seventh story, "Shadows of the Solitary Man," begins with Cornelia dragging Alex out of the bed to go to the home of Elias Morass, a collector of manuscripts, who has sold her manuscript of rare, unpublished detective novels in the past and now claims to have gotten hold of Hake Talbot's unpublished, long-lost third novel, The Affair of the Half-Witness – which is one of our near mythical treasures. Alex and Cornelia arrive at the strange, box-like and walled-in house, they're greeted by Detective Sergeant Jones-Smith. Not long before they arrived, a man dressed in black and wearing a motorcycle helmet forced his way into the house with a gun. There were five people present at the time, Elias Morass, his three children and a journalist. The masked man took one of them hostage, killed Elias and escaped outside where he vanished into thin air. Sounds relatively simple and straightforward for an impossible disappearance, but there's an ambitious and intricate scheme lurking underneath. However, the story is not entirely flawless as both the ambitious plot and daring murder needed more space to breath. I think the setup alone would have justified the length of the story and it's a pity Talbot's lost manuscript was only peripherally involved in the case. And no lore or mini-lectures on the detective story's lost media. So a good short story that could have been even better had it been longer, but handling a plot and idea like this in short story form is still impressive.
Unfortunately, I can't say the same about the next story, "A Diaphanous Wall of Jericho," which begins when Alex and Cornelia take a stroll through the graveyard of the village near their home. Alex to visit the graves of victims in their murder cases "whom she felt a responsibility to at least remember" and Cornelia "to gloat over all the people she had outlived" ("I have finally beaten you"), which is the best scene/part of this story, but then Cornelia spots a hat perched on top of a tree – asks Alex to fetch it for her. However, the hat was stained with blood and Alex saw a body through the top window. The tree is standing in the garden of the vicarage and "a strange house it was" occupied by two normally opposing clergymen, Reverends Viridian and Hurt, who previously appeared in Hangings at Hempel's Green. Recently, they found a common enemy and tore down the wall dividing their semidetached houses which was replaced by an invisible wall. They can't cross into each other's part of the house, because they both wear ankle monitors ("...can only be deactivated by both of our thumbprints at once") and deafening alarm goes off when they cross the invisible border. That complicated the problem of the body inside the locked room upstairs. Not to mention the two other potential suspects one of whom can't walk and the other has two broken arms. Or who they are and why they were there.
Carver was mentally in novel-mode here and definitely tried to cram too much into this short story, which made it more muddled as it rushed towards its conclusion. So this one didn't work for me, but that's inevitable with anthologies and short story collections.
"Where Good Intentions Go," on the other hand, is another favorite and a future addition to "The Locked Library." Alex and Cornelia have taken a holiday to the island of Snute where there's a pristine, secondhand bookshop without a digital presence, but, barely arrived, they bump into Jane Blue from "The Knife in the Devil's Throat." This time, her brother Dominic got himself involved in murder and pretty much the only suspect the police has. Dominic is doing intern work for a company manufacturing marine equipment and have been on the island to do a cross between a promotion and a competitive experiment for their underwater habitats ("they float on the surface of the ocean, with like a one-person hotel room underneath") called Isolation Submersibles pods. Lilian LeRouge, a famous documentary maker, and marine scientist Fiona Dieve have agreed to test the pods by seeing who can stay down the longest. And, since they're rivals, neither is willing to be the first to quit. Dominic's job is to bring them supplies and do daily checks, but one day, several months into the competition, he finds Lilian dead in her pod. Only they had keys and a picture is automatically taken every time someone opens the door.
So who else could have done it? But then a curious clue turns up inside the locked room establishing a link with the other locked pod "separated by miles of ocean." And this is followed by another murder under similar impossible circumstances. I love it when mystery writers get creative with their locked room settings as it opens the door to get creative and even original with the solution, which is an opportunity Carver took with both hands. Purely as a locked room mystery, it crackles with originality, especially the second murder. But on a whole, "Where Good Intentions Go" is a solid and another anthology worthy story. I love a good, rare underwater locked room mystery.
The tenth story, "The Man Who Read William Brittain," is obviously a homage to another master of the short detective story, William Brittain. This story follows Mr. Lionel Suss, an elderly chemistry teacher, who's a big fan of Brittain's detective fiction and particular the Mr. Strang series. Even trying to model himself after Mr. Strang. There are, however, no real mysteries or puzzles to be solved at Yew Valley Secondary School, until he's told a student was seen roaming around in the chemistry room – followed by "a bright flash in the room" ("...that boy's been playing with the gas taps..."). So they rush to the chemistry room to find it locked and empty, but someone had turned on all the gas taps except the master valve. There's an obvious suspect in Yew Valley's most notorious student, Bryson "Bud" Bruin, who appears to have more than one impossible trick up his sleeve for his teachers. Not only did he appear to have vanished from a locked classroom, but chalk writing inexplicably appeared on the blackboard after the locked classroom was entered.
This little prank has some serious consequences for Mr. Suss as it's made clear somebody has to take responsibility, if this results in a scandal. So the only thing Mr. Suss can do is step in the shoes of his hero and explain the apparently impossible, which he does with logic and reason. So all's well that ends well, but, some time later, something unexpected turned up to put a new perspective on his clever solution. Showing him that climbing on the shoulder of giants, even fictitious giants, takes more than adapting their style and mannerism ("What would Mr. Strang think? What would William Brittain think?"). Simply an excellent mystery and homage!
By the way, this story also has a nod and wink to The Kindaichi Case Files as the chemistry room has a ghost story said to be one of the Seven Mysteries of Yew Valley Secondary ("though what exactly the other six were, nobody was exactly clear").
The next story, "The Horrendous Occurrences of Colonel Henry Haunt," is tremendously entertaining parody of Hoch's Simon Ark series. Colonel Haunt, narrator, is now an old widow with grown-up children and grandchildren, but while his mind is going he still has clear and fond memories of an old friend, Simon Set. An apparently ageless, eternal wanderer he befriended in the Middle East during his time in the army. Colonel Haunt hasn't heard from Simon Set in ages when a mysterious invitation to come to a remote, rundown mansion to witness a special demonstration. A demonstration for only a handful of people: an American businessman named Mr. Glass, Colonel Haunt, Alex Corby and her great-aunt Cornelia. Simon Set, accompanied by his servant Long Shi, reveals to the group that he's 268-years-old and ready to finally share his secret for a price. Not without a convincing demonstration.
Simon Set has constructed a glass pyramid, containing black box, in which he will be sealed shut. Naturally, he disappears from the black box and reappears an hour later. Dead and decades younger! Cornelia, one of Simon's ardent critics, is not impressed in the slightest. Simply as a locked room mystery, this story offers what you can expect from stage magic shenanigans. No, the strength of the story is in the narrator who's not always there, the characters and getting to see a slightly villainous version of Hoch's Simon Ark. So not a blistering original impossible crime story, but tremendously entertaining homage.
That brings us to the penultimate tale, "Disappearance at Loch Dreich," in which Carver gets creative again with the setting. This time, Alex and Cornelia are holidaying at Loch Dreich somewhere in the remote Scottish Highlands and stay at one of the four old hunting towers currently "submerged past the first storey by flowing and treacherous floodwaters." They occupy the Library Tower as it houses a huge collection of rare, out-of-print mystery novels, but the other three towers are also occupied. Cal, Isa, and Tam, members of Wyrdine University's Paranormal Research Society, have the South Tower. Donald, an unpopular member of the same society, has Well Tower. Evelyn LeRouge, professional treasure hunter, is staying at the Oxbow Tower. The area is rich in history and legends of ancient treasures and stories of the Loch Dreich Monster. So how could one of them have vanished from their tower that was tightly locked from the inside and surrounded by floodwater? Followed by a gruesome slaying under nearly identical circumstances? Carver put the setting and circumstances of the flooding to great use to spin a pretty good impossible crime yarn with, what can be called, a custommade solution for the various impossibilities. So, needless to say, I liked it.
Finally, the thirteenth and last story, "The Tumbling Tower," closing out Death in 13 Rooms. Cornelia is once again dragging Alex along to the home of a collector who has the only surviving copy of an unknown Walter S. Masterman mystery novel ("...consequence when a warehouse holding an author's books is destroyed in the Blitz"). When they arrive, history finally caught up with the surviving copy of Masterman's novel as the house burned down to the ground. Cornelia refuses to give up and contacts the collector's nearest relative, Sir Francis Omar, who has a library of his own. And offers Cornelia to poke around. But while they are there, Sir Francis falls from the top of a tower and "grimly impaled on the rusted metal spikes of the gate." There was, of course, nobody else present up there when they saw him fall. Only two other people were present, Fernie and Hope, who were both so-called lost souls taken in by Sir Francis. Why is Fernie accusing Hope, a pale, undernourished girl younger than Alex, of having killed her entire family?
The problem with this last story is that it's perfectly fine by itself, not great, but fine. However, as the thirteenth and last story, it comes across as patchwork with Cornelia hunting for long-lost mystery novel and an impossible murder involving a tower, but not nearly as well-done or executed as in those previous stories. The locked room-trickery not as original or imaginative as what came before it. So not necessarily a bad story, but well below average for this collection and not the best story to close out on. Maybe it would have been better if the last two stories had been switched around.
So, there you have it, the thirteen, brand spanking new impossible crime stories making up Carver's Death in 13 Rooms. For me, "The Suicide Selfie Curse" and "Where Good Intentions Go" are the two standout stories with only "The Knife in the Devil's Throat," "A Diaphanous Wall of Jericho" and "The Tumbling Tower" falling short of the mark – one reason or another. Nailing it ten times out of thirteen is not bad and what makes Death in 13 Rooms a first-rate and noteworthy addition to the growing stack of locked room-themed anthologies and short story collections, but personally enjoyed the insight the short stories offered into Carver's mind as a writer and plotter. Carver's novels have on average four, or five, locked room murders and other types of impossible problems that get properly explored and examined. You can't write a Carver novel like The Christmas Miracle Crimes in short story form and it was interesting to watch Carver trying to contain that rich plotting style and creativity to the confines of the short story. These stories also revealed Carver's fascination with the role weapons can play in helping to make a murder look completely out of this world. Death in 13 Rooms could just as easily have been titled Wonder Weapons or An Armory of Miracles.
What more can I say? Carver's Death in 13 Rooms is a buffet for locked room addicts and impossible crime fiends. I look forward to the next meeting with Alex and Cornelia!
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