Puzzler of the week

[Scott MacLean]

This week's puzzler:

Recently I had a hankering to read Edward Gibbons� three-volume set, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, no small undertaking considering there are exactly 2500 pages of text and illustrations in each volume.

Sadly as I reached for them on the shelf I could see that mold had damaged every page and cover from the front of volume 1, though that cover was undamaged, to the back cover of volume 3, though it too was undamaged.

I called the local book repairer. He said that it would cost a penny a page and fifty cents a cover to repair and went on to tell me, to ''Bring the affected volumes over and come back in a week, I�ll be all done."

So, I show up in a week prepared to pay the bill, and it�s about half of what I expected it to be.

The question is, how much was the bill?

And, by the way, the statement that it was half is a hint.

Last week's puzzler:

There�d been an accident on the upper Canyon Road.  A middle-aged driver in a European sports car evidently lost control in the early morning hours and plunged a hundred feet to his death.

Even though he wore a seatbelt and the airbag had obviously deployed, neither could have prevented the broken neck that ended his life.  The police detective called to the scene began to study the evidence.  He slowly removed the dead man�s sunglasses, admiring them and thinking to himself how nice it would be to own a fancy pair of designer glasses like these.

He put them on and looked at himself in the driver�s side view mirror. "Nice, but not my prescription," he thought.  He removed them and carefully placed them on the dashboard.  He stared at the dead man�s face. He obviously hadn�t shaved that morning.  He noticed the deep impression those sunglasses had made on the bridge of his nose, the obvious result of the tremendous force created by the exploding airbag.  He stared intently into the dead man�s blue green eyes and thought how peaceful he looked and how his relaxed countenance belied the obvious terror of his last few moments on Earth.  He slowly rose from his uncomfortable crouching position.  He summoned one of the officers to the scene dust for prints.

This was a homicide.

The question is, how did he know it was a homicide?

Last week's puzzler answer:

What did he see, what did he know? This, I mean this, was loaded with hints. Right from the prescription sunglasses. And the staring into the blue-green eyes. Blue green eyes, one, he had one blue, one green. What he saw, and what made him suspicious was that the victim was wearing contact lenses, and you wouldn't be wearing your contact lenses and your prescription sunglasses at the same time.