Murdoku: 80 Murder Mystery Logic Puzzles vs Cain's Jawbone

Buy Murdoku if you want a stack of solvable puzzles you can work through over weeks. Buy Cain's Jawbone if you want one notorious literary puzzle to obsess over. Murdoku is the friendlier, more visual book: 80 full-color crime scenes, difficulty that ramps from easy to expert, and a sudoku-style logic grid that gives you a clear way to check your answer. Cain's Jawbone is a single 100-page murder mystery in which you must reorder the pages to identify six killers and their victims; it took years for anyone to solve it publicly, and most owners never finish. Reviewers praise Murdoku's production quality and variety; Cain's Jawbone is admired as a feat of construction but often described as brutal and frustrating.

• Choose the Murdoku if you want many self-contained logic puzzles with visual scenes and a difficulty curve you can actually finish.
• Choose Cain's Jawbone if you enjoy one hard, open-ended literary puzzle and don't mind that most solvers never crack it.