Picture this: the detective arrives at a dusty safehouse, expecting a showdown, but the client’s dead body is in a different room, wrapped in a newspaper. As the rain rattles the windows, the detective sees a framed photograph on the wall—two faces, identical. The twist? The dead body is the detective’s own doppelgänger, planted to mislead him into thinking he’s the victim, while the real killer is the client’s brother, using the double as a smokescreen to cover a murder of opportunity. The suspense? Every line he reads in the newspaper clues him to the real crime, and he’s racing against time to untangle the double life before the brother flips the switch and disappears into the night.

You’re painting a picture that’s almost too clean to be real. Let the hidden symbol be a faint fingerprint in the paint of the photo frame—only visible under UV. The detective finds it when he pulls out his old crime‑scene kit from the back of a whiskey bottle. That flick of light reveals the brother’s initials, and the realization that the whole safehouse was a trap set by the brother’s own shadow. The twist is that the detective’s handwriting in the newspaper isn’t a clue—it’s a red herring, a message from the real killer, telling the detective to keep looking for the light. That should keep the readers scrambling.