Murder at the Palace! is the final Dreadful Crimes case: Frederick Abberline calls you to Buckingham Palace, where a guard lies dead in Queen Victoria's study on the day of a knighting ceremony. The case pulls in clues from every earlier crime and ends with a rooftop standoff.
Part 10 of 10 in The Dreadful Crimes
The guard has no visible wounds, a vase is smashed, the window is broken and the vault door is gouged. The Queen asks you to step out while she checks the vault and is relieved to find the sceptre still there. A letter from Scotland Yard reports that a boy has been abducted.
Search the study, question the palace staff, then follow leads to Artie's yard, where an evidence wall and a message in invisible ink point to Purlock Publishing. There you find empty munitions crates, a palace plan with the study circled and the proof of a penny dreadful about an explosion at the palace. Race back and evacuate the guests and the Queen.
No bomb goes off: Henry Raymond was behind it all. In the Memory Palace you work out that he is a criminal mastermind using the evacuation as a diversion to steal the Sceptre with the Dove, and that he learned the safe's combination by watching the Queen open it. The dead guard was Raymond himself, faking death with spider venom. Abberline wakes you as Raymond takes Artie hostage on the roof; one twin keeps him talking at gunpoint while the other sneaks up and kills him.
Artie mourns that there will be no more Raymond stories to read. The twins suggest he write his own, and he decides to sign them Artie Conan Doyle, though Evie thinks Arthur sounds more serious.
A Simple Matter of Murder!
A Simple Matter of Murder! is the first Dreadful Crimes case: a foreman lies stabbed in a Whitechapel warehouse and a boy is found holding the bloody knife. Henry Raymond and young Artie introduce themselves and challenge you to solve it, and the obvious answer turns out to be wrong.
Death Stalks the Colonel
Death Stalks the Colonel is the third Dreadful Crimes case: Louis Prescott, a former army colonel who runs a munitions factory in Southwark, has been shot through the heart at noon. Several shots were fired at that moment, and you have to work out which bullet killed him.
Locked in... to Die!
Locked in... to Die! is the sixth Dreadful Crimes case: the music critic Byron Cashan is found dead in a room locked from the inside, in a lodging house in the Strand. You check each tenant's room and the basement to work out how the killer reached him.
The Case of the Conflicted Courtship
The Case of the Conflicted Courtship is the second Dreadful Crimes case: a young woman, Prudence Browne, has been stabbed to death in a park in the City of London. Her diary, a doctor's medicine packet and some handwriting clues lead you around the homes and office of the men in her life.