Book Review: The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni

Mike Brink was a teenage football star when an on-field collision knocked him out and changed his life forever. He woke up from his concussion with a strange ability that nearly drove him to suicide, before his mother intervened and got him to open up to her about the things he had started seeing:

He couldn’t explain it. His brain did it without his permission, the way his heart pumped blood or his lungs infused cells with oxygen. It latched on to patterns and sequences without his consent or, at times, his awareness and filled his head with a deluge of numbers and images. When he wanted to solve a puzzle, visualizing it was enough to call up the solution.

With his mom’s support and copious specialist consultations, he learns that he has Acquired Savant Syndrome, a very rare medical condition where a relatively ordinary person gains extraordinary cognitive abilities following a traumatic brain injury. Not only does he now see puzzles everywhere, he can also figure out their solutions at seemingly superhuman speed. Helping this is the eidetic memory he’s also developed, that allows him to memorize pages of text and details with minimal effort. 

So instead of accepting a football scholarship to a university of his choice, Mike aces the SATs and gets into MIT, where he starts hanging out both online and in real life with other puzzle and cryptology buffs. His fellow graduates are somewhat surprised when he subsequently declines job offers both prestigious and lucrative to set puzzles for a living instead. But the fame he gains from becoming a puzzle celebrity is what draws the attention of Jess Price, the author and convicted murderer who’s been confined to the minimum-security New York State Correctional Facility for the past five years.

Since the violent death of her boyfriend, Jess has barely spoken, and has refused to speak at all in her own defence even when accused of murder. It’s taken some time, but her psychologist Dr Thessaly Moses is gratified to finally make a breakthrough with her. Jess has constructed a puzzle, and insists to Thessaly that Mike is the only one who can solve it.

Intrigued, Mike drives the five hours from his home in the city to see if he can help these women he’s never met before. He’s thrown off guard by the strength of his immediate attraction to Jess, but resolves to do what he can to free her. Little does he realize that meeting her will plunge him into a world of esoterica populated by ultra wealthy people who will stop at nothing to access the secrets locked in her head. Nothing in his life has ever prepared him for the lengths that the truly obsessed and entitled will go to over a puzzle:

Brink had constructed puzzles under extreme deadlines, he’d withstood the pressure of a twelve-hour pi-digit contest, he’d solved puzzles for money and prestige and for his own sanity. But never had he been threatened over one. “Guns aren’t really my thing,” he said. He was numb from head to toe, his limbs tingling and bloodless. “I’m much more a die-peacefully-in-my-sleep-as-a-wrinkly-senile-hundred-and-one-year-old kind of guy.”

 

[The man] laughed. “So you see, Mr Brink, we aren’t so very different. We both value longevity. There’s no need to die prematurely. Certainly not now. So, let’s have the puzzle.”

Spanning centuries and continents, what starts out as a murder mystery swiftly becomes a techno-religious thriller in the vein of Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Mike and Jess have to figure a way out of the terrible things that are happening to them, while trying to carve out a path towards each other. There are, of course, puzzles included, and I found the Triangulum very elegantly constructed (if not, perhaps, as challenging as Mike believed.)

The spiritual lesson at the heart of the novel was also welcome, even if I thought that the book’s other spiritual theory was far less convincing due to its reliance on, of all things, blockchain technology. The history of binary systems in both mathematics and religion was thought-provoking though, even if some of the characters’ actions throughout the book beggared both logic and belief. Overall, this is a summer thriller for people who enjoy dabbling in lots of interesting subjects and, perhaps, learning a bit more about the serious topics and conundrums many of us don’t usually consider on a day to day basis.