Author Scott Adlerberg takes a closer look at the new suspense thriller “The Puzzle Master” By Danielle Trussoni.
Her fourth novel – she has also written two acclaimed memoirs – Danielle Trussoni’s The Puzzle Master is a complex creation. At its heart is the search for an ancient relic. It blends elements of the mystery story, horror tale, Gothic thriller, and historical narrative. It muses on things philosophical and theological and even has a touch of speculative fiction.
It has been some time since I read a novel I found as compelling as this one in two particular ways. One, the book is a page-turner, pure and simple; and two, it’s a thing to be admired in how it is structured. That Trussoni has erudition is obvious. What’s great for the reader is that she doesn’t get carried away showing it off. The learning all serves the end of suspenseful and propulsive storytelling.
The novel opens with a brief prologue set in Paris in 1909. Then the time jumps to upstate New York in 2022, and we are introduced to Mike Brink, puzzle master of the title. Thirty-two years old, a former high school football star, Brink took a big hit during a game that ended his playing days and transformed his life. After time unconscious, he awoke to find he has remarkable abilities, but as Trussoni writes in an introductory note: “…his abilities aren’t superpowers.
The novel opens with a brief prologue set in Paris in 1909…
They arise from a real medical condition called sudden acquired savant syndrome, a condition in which an ordinary person develops extraordinary abilities in art, music, mathematics, and even foreign languages.” It’s a condition that occurs after a traumatic brain injury, and there are fewer than fifty such documented cases of it in the world.
Brink’s ingenuity manifests in his remarkable ability to see patterns. He has an extraordinary memory as well. An unassuming person who lives alone with his dog, he has found a way to support himself as a puzzle constructor, work for which he has gained renown. Time magazine did a story on him, and he has been on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. From all over the world he gets “barraged with puzzles”, most of which he solves easily, but when he gets an invitation to solve a puzzle drawn by a prison inmate in the rural hamlet of Ray Brook, New York, he cannot resist looking into it.
The inmate is none other than Jess Price, a well-known writer put away for killing a man in an upstate mansion where she was house-sitting. Brink knows the case because it was an odd one: after her arrest, Price never said a word to the cops, her lawyers, anybody, and “she had been convicted of manslaughter without uttering a single word in her own defense.” The prison’s head psychologist, Dr Thessaly Moses, has asked Brink to come meet Jess.
The doctor’s actions, sharing a patient’s records, could get her in trouble, but she hopes Brink can decipher the weird puzzle Jess drew. Dr. Moses also believes that Brink may be able to play a role in unlocking, so to speak, the puzzle that is Jess herself. For the five years, since she was incarcerated, Jess has remained uncommunicative with everyone, the psychologist included.
Trussoni employs a number of voices to tell the story.
This is the plot’s set-up, an intriguing one. We have an unusual protagonist, and there is immediate tension, not to mention an erotic charge, in the meeting between Brink and Jess. But the puzzles and mysteries have only begun, and from here, the novel expands both forward and backward in time. It moves across continents and plunges into the realms of fear, arcane ritual, cutting edge technology, and metaphysics.
Trussoni employs a number of voices to tell the story. For most of the book, she uses third person narration, but major portions come from a journal Jess Price kept while residing in the house where she supposedly committed her crime. In this house, she discovers secret passages and a most unnerving life size doll that may be able to move of its own volition.
This segment is a gripping tale in and of itself, and the slow drip of revelations about the doll later leads to chapters comprised of a 1909 letter written by a celebrated French dollmaker who tells a tale about how he came to work in Prague for a master Czech dollmaker. These segments, too, kept me on edge, and the promise of uncanny doings in the Czech capital, city of alchemists and Kabbalists, the creation spot for that ambiguous creature, the Golem, is fully delivered.
Mike Brink functions as the prime investigator going through these different sources, and other important information he learns comes from an audio file Jess Price made with the help of the prison psychologist. This is classic Chinese box style storytelling, a type of narrative I have to say I particularly love, and when I realized the novel is built this way, I smiled. With its diabolic elements and its incorporation of so many genres, Trussoni’s book reminded me of Jan Potoki’s The Saragossa Manuscript, a magnificent Chinese box of a novel, and the author has spoken of how much she enjoys the work of Wilkie Collins, a master at using multiple narrators to unspool complex plots.
Collins and Potoki wrote in the 19th century, so in essence what Trussoni is doing is using old literary techniques in the service of constructing a contemporary thriller. She does this without a hint of pastiche in her writing, though, and without anything feeling retrograde. Her pacing and characterization, her entire sensibility, are of the here and now.
I mentioned that The Puzzle Master has a speculative fiction aspect. This comes into focus more and more as the novel progresses. But what you might call imagined technology is something the book’s characters use in their quest to attain certain things human beings have wanted to attain forever. Like the techniques evident in the novel itself, the new and the old merge. Theories about the quantum universe meet notions derived from centuries-old Jewish mysticism.
The potency of language, the nature of what people call God, the question of whether, in any form, human consciousness can outlive the body – the ideas fly by, some quite dense, and yet Trussoni ushers us through the puzzles within puzzles with a sure hand. She writes strong, clear, forward-moving prose. Mike Brink winds up on an adventure that takes him far from his previously quiet life, and in the process, despite hazards encountered, he experiences invigoration. So will you, reading this book.
*****
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