5 Tips to Crack Every Murder Mystery Word Search Faster

Raw speed helps, but methodical searching beats rushing every time. Hunting the grid too fast leads to missed words and wasted answer attempts. The five habits below are suggestions worth trying, not a guaranteed formula — every case is a little different.

Most players instinctively scan left to right, then top to bottom, and skip diagonals until last. Try doing a quick diagonal sweep near the start of each case instead — diagonal words are easy to miss on a straight read and easy to catch once you're specifically looking for them.

Do not hunt words from left to right letter by letter. Instead, pick the rarest letter in each target word and scan the entire grid for it first.

Letters like Q, X, Z, J, and V appear infrequently. If you are hunting a word like "QUICKLIME," find every Q in the grid first — there are usually only one or two — then check what follows. This is faster than scanning the whole grid letter by letter.

Every case has exactly one listed word that is never actually placed in the grid — that's the murder method, and it's meant to be identified by elimination, not found. Once you've searched carefully for a word and it genuinely isn't there, stop looking for it and note it as your method candidate instead of re-scanning the grid for it repeatedly.

Three- and four-letter words are everywhere in a grid — they turn up as substrings of longer words in every direction, which makes them easy to misidentify. Find the longer words first. They're easier to isolate, they clear large sections of the grid, and they leave the short words easier to confirm by elimination.

Once every word that is actually in the grid has been found, the remaining unhighlighted letters spell out the killer's name and the crime scene, read left to right, top to bottom. Read them as a continuous block rather than cell by cell — it's easier to recognize a name or place once you see the sequence together.

If you are new to Murdsearch, Cases 1–5 in each volume are a good place to get comfortable with the missing-word and leftover-letter mechanic before moving on to the rest of the library.