Puzzle Master

Mike Brink is a celebrated puzzle constructor who sees the patterns in the world better than anyone. He was once a promising Midwestern football star, but a traumatic brain injury changed him and gave him acquired savant syndrome, a rare condition. It left him with an extraordinary ability to solve puzzles that ordinary minds cannot, and it also left him isolated and unable to connect fully with other people.

His life changes when he meets Jess Price, who is serving thirty years in prison for murder and has not spoken since her arrest five years earlier. Price draws a baffling puzzle, and her psychiatrist believes it will explain her crime, so he calls in Brink to solve it. What starts as the pull of an irresistible cipher soon becomes an obsession with Price herself. She then reveals that something more urgent and more dangerous lies behind her silence, and Brink is pulled into a search for the truth.

The search leads him through a series of interlocking enigmas. At the center is the God Puzzle, a cryptic ancient prayer circle devised by the thirteenth-century Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia. As Brink works through the clues and his emotional bond with Price deepens, he comes to realize that powerful forces are at work and that he cannot escape them. The novel moves from an upstate New York women's prison to nineteenth-century Prague and the secret rooms of the Pierpont Morgan Library, in a thriller where the fate of humankind, technology and the universe itself is at stake.

Danielle Trussoni is also the author of the novel Angelology and the memoir Falling Through the Earth.