You’re right, coffee in hand and case on the table, and the line is razor thin. A story builds a puzzle with clean edges, while real life gives you a mess of half‑heard alibis, broken witnesses and motives that shift. The hardest part is taking that tidy framework and forcing it into the messy, unpredictable world where every clue can lie, and every lead pulls you into a new rabbit hole. The fiction keeps the motive tight, the evidence tidy; reality keeps the motive fuzzy and the evidence always incomplete. That’s the crack where the illusion falls apart.