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About the Book

About the Book

The Puzzle Master

Reality and the supernatural collide when an expert puzzle-maker is thrust into an ancient mystery --- one with explosive consequences for the fate of humanity --- in this suspenseful thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of ANGELOLOGY.

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, calculate equations and see patterns in ways ordinary people can’t. But his condition has also left him deeply isolated, unable to fully connect with other people.

Everything changes after Brink meets Jess Price, a woman serving 30 years in prison for murder. Traumatized by the crime, Price hasn't spoken a word since her arrest five years before. When she draws a perplexing puzzle, her psychiatrist believes it will explain the crime she committed and calls Brink to solve it. What begins as a desire to crack a strange and alluring cipher quickly morphs into an obsession with the woman who drew the puzzle. Price 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 13th-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 19th-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.

Audiobook available, read by Edoardo Ballerini

The Puzzle Master
by Danielle Trussoni