The Wedding Hall

Dushanbe · a Saturday wedding night · a feast without its plov · Difficulty: Detective 6 · 9×9

Dushanbe, a Saturday night in a toykhona, a wedding hall. The bride’s and the groom’s families had filled the tables, the music had been playing for hours and the wedding plov was ready to be served. Then Valijon, the oshpaz who had cooked it since dawn, was found dead. The plov was never served.

Rules

1. Every woman beside a table had a man beside the same table.
2. Every row and every column holds exactly one person. As soon as you place someone, cross out their whole row and column.
3. “Beside” = directly left, right, above or below, and in the same area. Squares with objects (the oven, the kazan, the shelf, the tables, the doira, the loudspeaker, the trees, the flower beds, the coat rack, the fountain, the car and the mirror) cannot be occupied; the chairs, the doormat and the bench can. A corner of an area is a square of it that faces outwards (another area or the edge of the board) on a horizontal and on a vertical side.
4. The murderer was alone with the victim: nobody else was in that area.

Statements

• Anvar (the bride’s father): Exactly one person was sitting in a chair – not him, but somebody in his area.
• Barno (the bride’s mother): She was beside a table.
• Chehra (the bride’s younger sister): She was in the last column.
• Dilovar (the groom’s uncle): The doira was somewhere in his column. Of the other people in his area, exactly one was a man.
• Ezoza (the groom’s cousin): A chair was somewhere in her row.
• Farrukh (the groom’s elder brother): The loudspeaker was somewhere in his row.
• Gulru (waitress): She was not in a corner of her area.
• Habib (doira player): He was the only one beside the loudspeaker.
• Valijon (the oshpaz, master of the plov): The victim. He was found in the Kitchen, beside the kazan – alone with the murderer.

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