Short Book Reviews: Puzzles Can't Carry the Plot

 The Puzzle Master, by Danielle Trussoni (Random House)

After a traumatic brain injury leaves him with a genius for constructing and solving puzzles, Mike Brink embarks upon a real-life riddle: novelist Jess Price, in prison for committing a notorious murder, pleads to see him in person although they have never met. She slips a baffling cipher to him, the “God Puzzle.” In trying to figure out what happened the night of the murder, what present danger has Jess terrified, and what the cipher means, Mike gets drawn into a twisted, generations-long story of forbidden arcane knowledge with the power to transform technology and humanity itself.

I loved the beginning of the book, especially the passages in which Mike sees puzzles as luminous patterns. Other than the occasional crossword, I’m not much for puzzles, so this “look-inside” was fascinating. As the story went on, with diaries telling stories-within-stories, I lost emotional connection with Mike. I distrusted his attraction to Jess as one more pasted-on artificial element. (It turned out there was a reason for the allure, but I didn’t see the signals that supernatural forces were at work.) Long passages that had nothing to do with Mike’s present quest intensified the emotional detachment. Three-quarters of the book, a series of characters arrived and proceeded, very much deus ex machina, to solve Mike’s problems for him while dumping huge, indigestible chunks of exposition. This part read as if two completely different books had been jammed together. Despite scattered scenes with action, the remainder of the book proceeded with very little sense that everything had been building to this point. In the end, Mike did relatively little to achieve his own goal or solve his own problems. The book was billed as a “thriller,” but the last part did a good job putting me to sleep. Which is too bad, really, because the material about puzzles was fascinating.