Puzzling

This past year for Christmas my little (well not that little anymore) brother gave hubby a mystery puzzle.  The mystery puzzle, titled "Grounds for Murder," came with a booklet that told the murder mystery story and puzzle pieces.  The biggest mystery is what the puzzle will look like since no photo is given (that would ruin the mystery).  It is a 1000 piece puzzle, and hubby and I finally decided to give it a try last week.

The puzzle sat on our kitchen table, and we would put in a few pieces here and there.  A couple of nights we spent an hour working on the puzzle as something to do after dinner.  Although frustrating at times (mostly because we didn't have the picture to work off of), the puzzle was actually a great thing to do while we hung out and talked.  It was a sort of team building exercise for the two of us as well as being a mental challenge.

Last night, after over a week of casual puzzling, we finally finished.  The puzzle depicted the scene found when the police searched the suspect's bags.  It was great to see the puzzle all in one piece, but we still weren't sure what sort of clue we should be getting from the puzzle to solve the mystery.  We went back to the story, which had a conclusion page written backwards.  Hubby and I read through the conclusion with the help of a mirror and finally found the solution to the mystery as well as the puzzle.

The completed puzzle