Scannell decided to try to find the right sequence by fulfilling a “lifelong dream”, as she put it, to turn her “entire bedroom wall into a murder board”. The number of possible combinations of pages is a figure that is 158 numbers long. And it’s the reader’s job to discover what the real order is and thereby identify six murder victims and their killers. The distinctive, not to say brain-aching, novelty of Cain’s Jawbone is that its 100 pages are numbered out of sequence. It is currently unavailable on Amazon and in bookshops, with new stocks not arriving, according to its publisher, Unbound, until 12 December.
#What is moment of inertia of a circle series#
Thanks to a series of TikTok postings by Sarah Scannell, a young documentary assistant in San Francisco, which have been watched by some seven million people, the book has sold out. But it’s Powys Mathers’s novel, entitled Cain’s Jawbone, that is set to fly off the shelves this Christmas. It was a good year for modern classics with F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius all making their debuts. That same year another murder mystery appeared, to rather less fanfare, by “Torquemada”, a contributor to this newspaper famed for his inscrutable crosswords and his concealed identity – he was, in fact, a poet and translator called Edward Powys Mathers. I n 1934 Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express was published and became a bestseller.