Find the Fake

Find the Fake

A Scottish art mystery puzzle: 2,000 paintings · 5 cases · 1 forgery

On Friday at eleven, a small Edinburgh auction house sells everything the painter Hester Mayne left behind. One painting is missing. One won her a ticket to Paris. One was never for sale. And one of them, somewhere in the list, isn’t hers at all.

You’re the new cataloguer. You have the inventory, a pen, and five days.

A pen-and-paper mystery for an evening away from your phone. And it fits in a Christmas stocking.

On Amazon late November 2026Try case 1 free

Paperback, 6 × 9 in. By Rod McLaren.

How it works

Read the caseLetters, notes, newspaper cuttings and photographs. Some sentences are clues.
Cross outEach clue rules paintings out of the inventory at the back of the book, until only one is left.
Check the endingLook up its lot number in the endings. If you’re right, the story goes on.

No maths, no wordplay, nothing to know in advance. Each case takes about 15 to 40 minutes.

Try case 1 free

Case 1 is free to play here, on your phone or computer. Hester’s grandson Callum has taken a painting to be reframed, but nobody knows which. Fourteen minutes, for our first tester.

Play case 1
Case 1 · The missing painting

Monday, 8.40am. Four days to the Mayne sale.

Ruth Malik, the house conservator, has brought you down to the store for the first time. The store book lies open on a packing case.

Clue 1 1 painting on paper, from the small rack (paintings under 40 cm wide).

LotTitleYearSize
421Allotment Garden, Rose Street193944×56
422Blackout, Broughton Street193944×56
423Close off the Cowgate193946×33
424Garden in Frost193938×28
425Garden, After Rain193926×36
426Garden, Moonrise193924×32
From case 1, with the first clue applied: anything 40 cm or wider is crossed out.

From Ruth’s desk

Ruth Malik is the conservator at Ure & Balfour: dry, usually right. Now and then she writes about what’s come into the store, with a puzzle or two and news of the next book. Join, and she’ll send you a short bonus case straight away. It’s free, and you can unsubscribe any time.

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How this book was made

Find the Fake is a book of invented paintings by an invented painter, and the program that made them was written with AI. Here’s how.

Hester Mayne never lived. Ure & Balfour, Ruth, Callum, Halkett, Fiona and Bel are invented too, and so are all 2,000 paintings.

I’m Rod McLaren, a writer in Ayrshire. The idea for the book, the five cases and the people in them are mine, and I have edited every line of the story.

I made the book with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Claude wrote the computer program that generates the inventory: 2,000 paintings, eight facts each, all consistent with Hester’s life. The same program checks every case every time the book is built: that each clue is needed, that exactly one painting is left at the end, that the order you use the clues in doesn’t matter, and that the story never hints at something no clue tests. Claude and I drafted the story, argued about it, and then I rewrote it. The book would not have happened without AI, and yes I feel a bit weird about that too.

Then people played it, with a pen and a timer. They told me what was too easy, what was unclear and where the typos were, and the book changed because of them. Thank you to S, A and J.

The images in this book are by Julie Telfer McLaren.

If you find a mistake or have ideas about other books, I’d like to hear about it: hello@findthefake.co.uk.