The Puzzle Master

 

Title: The Puzzle Master

Author: Danielle Trussoni

Publisher: Random House

Release Date: 6.13.23

Publisher’s Summary 

All the world is a puzzle, and Mike Brink—a celebrated and ingenious puzzle constructor—understands its patterns like no one else. Once a promising Midwestern football star, Brink was transformed by a traumatic brain injury that caused a rare medical condition: acquired savant syndrome. The injury left him with a mental superpower—he can solve puzzles in ways ordinary people can't. But it also left him deeply isolated, unable to fully connect with other people.

Everything changes after Brink meets Jess Price, a woman serving thirty years in prison for murder who hasn't spoken a word since her arrest five years before. When Price draws a perplexing puzzle, her psychiatrist believes it will explain her crime and calls Brink to solve it. What begins as a desire to crack an alluring cipher quickly morphs into an obsession with Price herself. She soon reveals that there is something more urgent, and more dangerous, behind her silence, thrusting Brink into a hunt for the truth.

The quest takes Brink through a series of interlocking enigmas, but the heart of the mystery is the God Puzzle, a cryptic ancient prayer circle created by the thirteenth-century Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia. As Brink navigates a maze of clues, and his emotional entanglement with Price becomes more intense, he realizes that there are powerful forces at work that he cannot escape.

Ranging from an upstate New York women's prison to nineteenth-century Prague to the secret rooms of the Pierpont Morgan Library, The Puzzle Master is a tantalizing, addictive thriller in which humankind, technology, and the future of the universe itself are at stake.

My Review

I loved Danielle Trussoni's "The Ancestor" and will forever associate it with the first days of the pandemic. I was desperate for an escape and that story was a lifesaver. I feel like this book was another rescue. I am burnt out on reviewing and just want to enjoy reading for the sake of reading again. I requested this title from the library and was able to simply fall into this story, without taking constant mental notes for a future review. I would describe this as a combination of The DaVinci Code and The World That We Knew, and despite there being horror elements, I would tell readers who don't like horror to still give it a try.