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In November of 2025, inside the kitchen, inside a house near Southport, Kevin Fray was doing the washing up when his wife, Liz Blackwell, said she had an idea. She wondered if they could make a puzzle book together. The format would be that you are a ‘detective’ and are given a list of murder suspects’ names, and clues relating to those names – things like ‘the killer’s name is more than three letters long’, or ‘the killer’s name only has two vowels in it’. Then, using those clues, you have to whittle down who the murderer is.
It sounds simple, but the tricky thing was that the list of names would be really, really long – 46,600 names long, to be precise. ‘I just thought it was out of the box and fun,’ says Blackwell.
She also thought that, barring her and her husband, most people would hear the concept ‘and go, “Why on earth would you do that?”’
Plotting puzzles is usual for Fray and Blackwell. The couple (aged 36 and 34, a former software engineer and primary school teacher respectively) are puzzley people. When he was a boy, Fray’s grandparents would cut out newspaper crosswords for him; by eight, he had built a hi-tech digitised jigsaw ‘with the corners chopped off and pieces that you had to rotate into each other’. Meanwhile, Blackwell was the sort of child who did ultra-hard sudokus for fun and, when asked by her primary school to ‘draw a bug’ as homework, returned with a handmade ‘3D wire model of a ladybird’.
They met online in 2019, moved in together a year later and married, ‘just us two’, last October. Fray and Blackwell have visited more than 100 escape rooms together and love doing daily puzzles.
Back to the kitchen in November. After that evening, Fray began creating a computer programme that would bring his wife’s bonkers puzzle idea into existence. He worked on it after work, while Blackwell thought of clues. It took them ‘about a month’ to finish and, at the end, they wanted a physical copy.
So, in February, they put the puzzle on Amazon’s self-publishing section for £12.99. (Self-publishing a book is apparently easy: you just upload a PDF version of it to Amazon, and the company will print copies to order. The cut Amazon takes depends on an individual book’s printing costs but, roughly, it’s 40 per cent.) They called it The Killer Isn’t Alice (or Alice for short) and listed the author under a pseudonym: ‘Iris Starling’.
Liz and Kevin’s puzzle book sparked a bidding war with publishers
They didn’t do any of this because they thought the book might sell. ‘We didn’t expect anyone to find out about it,’ says Blackwell. ‘We didn’t develop a social-media presence for Iris Starling or anything.’ But, in case someone did order a copy, they made a website on which you could enter your solution to the puzzle to see if it was right.
For the first week, bar the couple’s own order, book sales were zero. Then, weirdly, the next week 181 people had placed orders. (Fray and Blackwell still do not understand how this happened.) More weirdly, within three weeks, several puzzle fiends had bought Alice and posted social-media videos saying how addictive it was. ‘Those went viral, then basically it went from having just a few orders to us looking at our computer screen and saying, “What the hell is going on? Is this real?”’ There were thousands and thousands of sales. By April, Alice had shifted 20,705 copies.
Most people, Fray and Blackwell estimate, can solve the puzzle in two-ish weeks, if they are doing it for an hour each day. And, quickly, the couple began getting emails from excited solvers – in Britain, Japan, America, the Philippines – saying they had completed, and loved, the book.
Alice was so popular that people started making counterfeit copies, too. ‘Someone, or some company, had photocopied the entire book,’ says Fray. Solvers would then buy it, realise they’d got a fake, and send the Iris Starling website photographs of their shoddy version. Worse, says Blackwell, ‘was that some other people put out a different book, which was a copycat of Alice with our cover on it but a completely different puzzle inside’. However, that puzzle didn’t work. ‘We’d get emails from people saying they spent hours and hours [solving the puzzle] and then they realised it was a counterfeit. And, honestly, I felt so bad.’
Counterfeits are a problem with self-publishing, says Fray. ‘I think if people see, oh this book has just been put up by an independent person and doesn’t have a big brand behind it, then they feel there’s less risk to do something like [making counterfeit copies].’
Thankfully, that same month they were approached and signed by WME, the glitzy US agency whose client list of writers, actors, singers and athletes includes: Angelina Jolie, Dakota Johnson, Ben Affleck, Serena Williams, Carlos Alcaraz, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama and, now, Kevin Fray and Liz Blackwell. (After our interview, Fray and Blackwell are meeting their agent, who has flown from New York for the first time in person, and is taking them to an escape room.)
WME pitched Alice to various publishers, a process that concluded in the book being sold at a 16-way auction in the UK (Fray and Blackwell picked Penguin) and a 12-way auction in the US (they went with Little Brown). ‘We had to do so many Zoom calls,’ says Blackwell. ‘And we were surprised because we thought we had to impress everyone. But, actually, the publishers were trying really hard to impress us, and we were like, “Really?!”
‘It was crazy because we’re so not used to that. We were just sitting in our tiny little home office and we were like, “Oh no, I don’t think we’re in a posh enough place.”’ Fray joins in, ‘And then there was this whole auction process and the money discussion starts, and our minds are blown, but the agent is going, “No. We can get more than that!”’
The duo don’t say how much they’ve made, but, after three months of the Amazon sales alone, Fray says, ‘We started seeing crazy money – enough to quit a job. And then we started seeing money in a day that’s like…’ he trails off. By March, Blackwell had quit her job to focus on Alice full time; by April, so had Fray. They’ve now sold almost 300,000 copies and the proceeds from that, plus the book deal, have, says Blackwell, ‘[totalled] an amount we could only dream of’.
Email your answer to editor@you.co.uk to see if you caught the killer
They are being sensible about spending it. ‘We’re speaking to a financial advisor,’ says Blackwell. ‘We haven’t moved house. We haven’t really changed much.’ Actually, says Fray, ‘We were laughing the other day because the only lifestyle change we’ve had is getting a cleaner once a week. Which has been massive!’ Blackwell agrees. ‘We’re trying to focus on just being creative and happy every day. Yes, we’ve had this big change, but we don’t want it to change us.’
Officially published last month, Alice sold 4,452 copies in its first week and, at the time of writing, has been on the bestseller list for four weeks. At the end of September, it sold 4,945 copies in one week, placing it third on the bestseller list: behind Ottolenghi’s new cookbook (6,955 copies) and a Halloween-themed colouring book (6,000) and ahead of Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals (4,605).
Fray and Blackwell ‘don’t come from some lineage of puzzlers’. When Fray showed an initial copy of the book to his dad, the father was baffled. ‘He said, “You could print a few of these and take them to a car boot sale and you might sell a few.” Our families are proud of us, but I don’t think they really get the…’ and then they both start laughing. Have any of either of their parents completed the puzzle? ‘No!’
The couple have spent the last year doing, largely, book admin – and, they say excitedly, writing a sequel. It’s called The Killer Isn’t Beth and it will be published in March 2027. (Blackwell: ‘Can we say that?’ Fray: ‘Yes, we can say that. Exclusive!’) Blackwell also has a folder about ‘this wide’ – she makes a War And Peace-sized gesture with her thumb and forefinger – filled with puzzle ideas.
For now though, they are enjoying being bemused by Alice’s success: by the fact they are currently sitting on the top floor of Penguin’s swish London offices before meeting their New York agent; by the fact they have quit their jobs and become bestsellers; by the fact they now have a cleaner. Recently, they visited Waterstones in Manchester and Blackwell saw a woman pick up a copy of Alice. ‘We thought, “She doesn’t know we created that, and we’re right here!”’