I write logic puzzles that come with a body, a motive, and a map.
This started as a complaint. Most logic-grid books hand you four names, four colors, and no reason to care which is which — and then, somewhere near the end, quietly expect you to guess. My view is that a puzzle you can't prove isn't a puzzle. It's a coin toss with extra steps.
So the Frontier Logic books are built the other way around. The answer comes first, the clues are written to reach it, and then the case is checked by exhaustive search to be certain no second answer exists. If it can't be proved from the clues on the page, it doesn't go in the book. You have my word on that: if you're guessing, you haven't finished reading.
The Arizona Territory turned out to be the right country for it — the last corner of American storytelling where a plain fact is genuinely hard to come by, where everyone has somewhere else they claim to have been and the only honest record is whatever the deputy could stand behind. A faro dealer who never loses. A pass narrow enough that two riders have to go single file. A debt gathering interest since spring. I'd rather introduce a suspect properly than save a page.
The rest is respect for whoever is holding the pencil. Grids with room to write in. Cream paper instead of glare. A large-print edition of every volume at 16-point type, because a puzzle you have to squint at is a puzzle you put down. Every book stands alone.
I've never set foot in the Arizona Territory, on account of it not existing anymore. I write from Coeur d'Alene, up in the Idaho panhandle — lake country, but hard country too, with silver camps in the valleys east of here and a fair number of places on the map that were an argument before they were a town. Book four is called The Bitterroot Cases, after a flower that grows a good deal closer to my door than it does to Cactus Flat. That one wasn't an accident.
Five volumes so far. The territory keeps turning up open files.