The Mystery of the Twice-Dead Professor! is the fifth Dreadful Crimes case: the anthropologist Professor Byng was buried after a heart attack, then turned up bleeding at his own door and died again. You investigate his home, the cemetery, the university and an abandoned house in the Strand.
Part 5 of 10 in The Dreadful Crimes
Byng's body has a deep, surgical-looking cut to the forehead. His family vault has been broken open and the coffin is empty, while the gravedigger's coat holds a note about payment for a night's work. A treatise by Professor Wilson describes a Bolivian spider whose venom mimics death, and Wilson complains that a rare specimen escaped from his lab. A chapter has been torn from one of Byng's books, and a lawyer's letter mentions a change to his will.
Byng's son Emmett, the maid Angela, the gravedigger Beswick, Professor Silas, Professor Wilson and Wilson's assistant Virginia, who hopes to marry Emmett.
Professor Silas, Byng's former student, used the spider venom to put him into a death-like coma, had him taken from the vault and tried to eat his brain in a ritual from the very tribe Byng had studied, hoping to absorb his knowledge.
The maid Angela heard pounding at the door, found the professor bleeding and heard him repeat two words she could not understand; she also warns that Emmett is terrified of spiders. A crate marked for Byng's eyes only held a carved African sculpture with a hidden recess. Pressed hard, Beswick the gravedigger confesses to selling bodies on the side and says someone wheeled the professor away in the dark, leaving tracks in the mud.
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.
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.
Murder at the Palace!
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.