All Hands

November 1913. The worst storm in the history of the Great Lakes takes two freighters of the Brandt Steamship Company with every man aboard. The towns put up their memorials. The company files its papers. Twenty-six men cleared Two Harbors on the Frederick A. Brandt that morning. Only twenty-five were ever named.

Fifty years later, in a Cleveland office whose files are about to be hauled away and pulped, a clerk with thirty-three years of casualty files finds the hole in the count. He has twelve days, a steel ruler and the company's own paper. He needs someone to check his sums.

He needs you.

How it works

• 64 men on the season's payroll. One of them is the man nobody named.
• Every chapter hands you the paper: ship's articles, a customs clearance, a telegram, pay-off sheets, a boarding-house book, a coroner's inquest.
• Strike every man the paper proves was not aboard, and check your count against the clerk's at the end of every stage.
• When one name is left, you've reached the only conclusion.

No murder. No trick. Real history, invented paperwork, one answer.