Now playing — the first case
Cold Plate
A Dr Eleanor Shaw mystery — Hong Kong, 1894.
Eleven pounds of mahogany and brass by the study door, eight glass plates still in their black paper envelopes. A senior partner dead at the Hong Kong Hotel, the attending physician calling it apoplexy. The Crown Colony wants the matter quiet. You have one week before the case goes cold.
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What is Branchwright?
Branchwright publishes hand-authored interactive mysteries in the tradition of Doyle and Christie. You read what the detective records. You ask what she asks. You can examine anything — examine the cabinet, ask Henderson about the registers, check the safelight — and the world answers in voice, in the story's prose register.
The main case is written by a human. You cannot change who the murderer is. But how you find out is yours, in whatever order you find it.
Two honest disclosures
On AI. Every word of the authored prose has been scanned by multiple AI-content detectors and verified as human-written. The piece that does the LLM work is the oracle — the thing that answers your free-form questions in the detective's voice, bounded by the case and the current scene. We disclose this; we don't bury it.
On the cover. The cover art is AI-illustrated. A real artist is what we'll commission once a title earns it. The prose is the part we're uncompromising about; the cover dressing will improve.
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About
Edward B. Haynes holds an English degree from the United States Naval Academy. In 1994 he sailed aboard one of the last American ships to visit British Hong Kong before the 1997 handover — three years before the Crown Colony of the Cold Plate setting formally ceased to exist. The harbour Dr Shaw photographs in March of 1894 is, in its bones, the same harbour he watched from the deck of an American warship a century later.
Cold Plate is the first in a series of Dr Eleanor Shaw mysteries from Branchwright Originals.