1001 Chess Excercises - 202 solution

I am a total beginner and have just started studying with the help of this book. Hence I have a question regarding the excercise 202. The correct solution is Rc6, but before looking for the answer at the end of the book, I chose Re5. Why is Re5 not possible/correct? Is it not a correct way if trapping the king? To me it also seems that the book's solution is a check and not mate or am I missing something here due to being a very beginner ?

Thank you, 

Salkis

Re5 looks fine to me. The King can't capture it as it's protected by the pawn on f4, the King has no available square to move too so it's checkmate. The books solution is also checkmate because Black's Bishop is pinned by White's Bishop on c8.

I see. So both options are checkmates. Pity that the book didn't indicate that there are two options/solutions and that got me a bit confussed. 

Thank you very much for your answer

The book might not have mentioned the Re5 option as it's probably trying to show you how a player can get positional or material advantage from a pinned piece. I was going to mention that earlier but you said that you are a beginner so I tried not to confuse you too much 🙂 A pinned piece is something that you might come across from time to time so keep an eye out for it and see if you can take advantage of that to gain a piece or a better position.

(L)

Indeed, it might be the reason

The book is a bit confussing since it stars with excercises like mate in one ,mate, in two, the missing piece and only then come the chapters about double attack, pin, decoy sacrifice etc., but all these previous exercisers already include the knowledge of these later chapters. That makes studying a bit overwelming for me. But it seems that all these tactics quite often play along, and maybe that is making it difficult to put the chapters in the "right" order

MayI ask another question about chess annotations. One of the answer to the exercises (218) was: 1.Nxd7 Nxd7 2.Kxe6+ e 3.Rxd7
My question is what does the lonely e mean in this case (it is not a typo or)?

Thank you

Very good question and one I can't answer as I've never come across it before. An e.p is usually en passant but that doesn't make much sense when it's a King move. Hopefully someone else can answer that question as I'm not sure what that means. If nobody else can help you here, try checking the back of the book for an explanation.

f5+ Ke5 Bxd7