As a former psychology student and puzzle lover, of course I was interested to read about a character with acquired savant syndrome who can solve any puzzle and becomes entangled with supernatural forces. However, I didn't love the writing and that's something I tend to value over plot. It's written in third person and I had trouble connecting, but others may love it for the intriguing plot.

i was hooked from the begiining, as the idea of a puzzle master intrigued me. I enjoyed following along on Brink’s adventure.
Many thanks to Random House and to Netgalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book might have been too big brain for me, I had a hard time following along. I loved Mike’s storyline of becoming a savant after a traumatic brain injury, but the numbers and God Puzzle utterly confused me 😂

3.5 stars

This was an interesting one even if it's not what I was expecting. It was an interesting meld of mystery, thriller, historical fiction, cryptography (of sorts), and mysticism.

I liked Mike Brink's character, and I really enjoyed the parts where his genius was showcased but also found it interesting to learn how challenging it was for him to live a "normal" life. I also liked his relationship with his dog and how they saved each other. I do wish she had had a bigger role in some of the dangerous moments, though!

Where this book sometimes lost me was in the discussions about religion and the Kabbalah. I don't know if the study of the Kabbalah has any connection directly communing with demons and angels, but the religious mystery in this book made me think of Dan Brown's books.

The book was a bit all over the place, and the pacing was uneven. There were moments I was completely engrossed and other places where I had to reread passages because I would lose track of what I was reading.

There were some really good moments where I was completely creeped out (man, that doll!), but then there were moments when Brink was caught by the villains, but suddenly they would be working together (okay not by choice, but still). As I said, a bit uneven. That said, the main villain came off as being rather insane. and that heightened the creep factor for me. I also enjoyed the letters that revealed the original past mystery surrounding the doll. Yikes!

Overall there was enough in this book that kept me reading it and trying to figure out how they would survive. I enjoyed the experience and would be open to reading more books by the author.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

O man, this really brought me back to my Dan Brown days. The Puzzle Master is a murder mystery wrapped in a literal puzzle, a puzzle that only a hot guy with a cute dog and a traumatic brain injury that makes him hyper-cognizant of patterns can solve. While a bit cheesy and far-fetched at times, this book is a fast-paced thrill ride that was a lot of fun to read. The ending was a bit predictable/anti-climactic, but I’m still curious to see where Mike Brink’s puzzle solving shenanigans take him next.

A few chapters in, it was exactly as blurbs said - a mix of Silent patient and The Da Vinci code. A puzzle expert meets an inmate who has not corresponded with anyone else and next minute, he is thrust into a high stakes puzzle and people are watching them constantly. This is a thriller that is totally different from others and the God puzzle is the most focussed on this. It takes us to Prague, Paris and Newyork following multiple timelines. This is an ultimate puzzle for Brink and more twists await him in his puzzle solving journey. Overall, it's a complex thriller and takes a bit for the readers to sink in as it involves multiple genres amalgamated into one wild plot-line.

Thank you to Random House Publishing and Netgalley for an eARC copy of The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni.

I was introduced to the book through an email from the publisher inviting me to read and review. The title alone was enough to interest me to dig into what would turn into a thriller that was refreshing to read. Especially when it comes to supernatural and religious toned thrillers. It was also nice to see the North Country of New York represented, so that also had it going for it.

After suffering a traumatic brain injury resulting in a diagnosis of acquired savant syndrome, Mike Brink is known for solving and creating puzzles that others cannot even wrap their heads around. So, when he is reached out to by a psychiatrist from the Ray Brook's women's correctional facility with a puzzle produced by an inmate known as Jess Price, he drives all the way from New York City to solve it. But when it is revealed to him that the puzzle is dangerous and that people are watching, Mike is pulled into a pursuit to solve the puzzle in time.

I loved the incorporation of the letters, journal entries, and transcriptions. BUT, I was not a fan of the multiple point of views (thought this is more personal as I've found very little books that do this well enough to be enjoyed).

This is the first book I've read by Danielle Trussoni and I was glad that I did! Hope to revisit her writing in the future.

- [ ] I immediately, like from the very first page knew that I was going to love The Puzzle Master. I got Silent Patient Vibes from the beginning and I just knew this was going to be a really good book. I loved the different moving parts of this novel. I really loved the diary bits from Jess. Reading about her time in that old spooky house really set the tone for this book. I also really loved reading about the history of the doll and how it came to be. I will say, I was a little lost at the end with all the religious jargon but that’s just because the subject is not something I am well versed in. Overall, I loved this book and can’t wait to read more from this author!

Mike Brink was a typical teen, until a terrible accident changed his entire life, and bestowed upon him an awesome power. Puzzles, patterns, and things that would mystify most people are no longer a chore for Mike. He sees things in an entirely new way, called acquired savant syndrome, where synesthesia is his brain's new super power and allows him to not only solve puzzles in mere moments with little effort, but also allows him to become a master puzzle creator.

This talent, along with the ability to seed read and retain all the information laid in front of him, makes Mike a superstar in the media, and puts him on the radar of some very powerful, important people. People who don't desire his talents for good. One such person is Jameson Sedge, who will stop at nothing to achieve his terrifying ends. Mike is first contacted by a psychiatrist, seeking help for a patient, Jess Price, former writer and convicted murderer. She's in desperate need, and will only speak to him. Intrigued, he steps into what will become the most dangerous event in his life.

Can he help Jess, and save his own skin? Is this a puzzle he can solve?

This story was action packed, so much fun, and there was room left for a sequel of epic proportions. Looking forward the next, and hoping to see more of Jess Price!

I wanted to love this, but overall I felt confused and underwhelmed. The premise of a puzzle master and some supernatural and crime had me so excited and honestly, the first 25% of the novel had me intrigued, 5 star worthy. However, slowly throughout the novel, everything became more muddled and confusing. The pacing was full throttle however, I did not care for anything. I was hoping to solve puzzles and see extreme foreshadowing that then lent itself to an explanation/reveal at the end.

Also the grown adults with the insta-love/fantasy come true romance was very cringey.

2.5 stars

The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni

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 in ways ordinary people can't. But it also left him deeply isolated, unable to fully connect with other people.

Everything changes after Brink meets Jess Price, a woman serving thirty years in prison for murder who hasn't spoken a word since her arrest five years before. When Price draws a perplexing puzzle, her psychiatrist believes it will explain her crime and calls Brink to solve it. What begins as a desire to crack an alluring cipher quickly morphs into an obsession with Price herself. She 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 thirteenth-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.

This story was intriguing and kept me flipping the pages. I was not sure at first if I would like the book, but I kept going and so glad I did. There are puzzles and supernatural sprinklings throughout the book. Danielle Trussoni story kind of had the Stephen King vibe to it. I highly recommend this book especially if you like puzzles and supernatural story telling.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Publishing for a free copy of The Puzzle Maker for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions in this review are my own.

Really really awful. Mike Brink has acquired savant syndrome of a sort that allows him to see patterns in data and forms. He went to MIT as a math major. Then he was a spy. He goofed up and now designs puzzles. Mike is summoned to a prison by an aphasic inmate who, upon meeting him, starts to speak. They become psychically linked. There is an evil prison guard who is part of a secret society. The prison shrink died in a car accident. The inmate has a magic porcelain doll. Murdered people have strange markings sliced into their skins. The procession of nonsense goes on.

Mike Brink is a high school football superstar with a bright future ahead. And then, the hit. He is transformed in an instant from an all-star athlete to someone with acquired savant syndrome and a gift for creating and solving puzzles. There are lots of layers to this novel as puzzles are used to solve crimes and unlock "life's greatest mysteries". It is a page turner that is full of unexpected twists, so I don't want to ruin anything. That being said, there are aspects of this book that bothered me, and I am happy to elaborate privately.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House books for an advanced e-copy of the book and to Cindy Burnett at Thoughts From a Page for the advanced hardback.

2.5 stars out of 5

It pains me to write this review, because I consider myself a fan of Danielle Trussoni's work. This one was a total flop.

Mike Brink is hit with a life-altering sporting concussion that makes him a genius. It's a real— albeit very rare— condition called savant syndrome. No puzzle is too great for him, and he sees patterns in everything around him. He's called upon by a psychiatrist in a prison to help with an inmate who's obsessed with not only puzzles, but him. Soon Mike is caught in the crossfire of many things: some centuries old.

I do want to say that I found the core of the story to be very interesting. Trussoni weaves an intricate web. The flashback chapters are the best portions, beautifully written. But...

The book suffers from idea whiplash; it's an adventure and puzzles are involved, and now it's a romance before the two have even said a word to each other, and look over here! now it's a spy thriller, and also let's throw in some long-winded essay-like paragraphs on philosophy and the histories of art and binary code and the Kabbalah. ALL of these things are great ideas, but there were some poor execution choices that made very little of it work for me.

To start, the writing is so hot and cold.. which doesn't feel like the Trussoni I'm used to reading. From page 1 things are hyperbolic; situations are "absolutely impossible", puzzles are "the most perplexing, utilizing utmost complicated math"— only to be solved two seconds later— and people are always "in something far more dangerous than they realize".

The character development is stunted by the jarringly quick pace of the first portion, as if Trussoni was in a rush to get to some grand point. And when the surface personality traits are given, they aren't followed, dampening all believability in their actions and dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, there's a consistently blockbuster predictability that makes me feel really disappointed.

I simply couldn't overlook these things to enjoy the main plot.

Thanks to Random House for gifting this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I don’t know that I have ever been so entranced at the beginning of a book before. This story just pulled me right in!! I wanted to know all about that puzzle and how it’s connected to the prisoner and the puzzle master and how it would be solved IMMEDIATELY!

But then… it was different. And then it got even more different until it turned into something completely different. Not necessarily different bad, because it was still very exciting and interesting, but it was definitely not what I thought I was reading.

This book is MANY things. Several genres mixed into one. It is a murder mystery, a supernatural story, religious, and also technologically driven. It was a lot. A LOT.

I liked the whole God puzzle/savant plot, the golem subplot, and even the Lilith story. But once it started going AI, it got confusing and strange. Too much information in one book was the problem, I think.

That said, I read this book in two days because it’s fast-paced and just crazy enough to keep me turning pages out of curiosity!

This book was absolutely incredible. I was hooked from the very second I started. Every time I put it down I just wanted to pick it back up again. There is just so much depth and layers to this book. I never knew what to except. I didn't even try to make guesses. I've been having not the best luck with thrillers lately so it was nice to find one I enjoyed. They can start to blend together after a while and this one definitely stands out. I watched a live with Danielle on Monday, she mentioned this is going to be a series. I can't wait to see where book two takes Mike Brink. (Danielle said it's set in Japan and I'm still not over it.)

Renowned puzzle constructor Mike Brink is asked to meet with a female prisoner, jailed for manslaughter who hasn’t spoken since her arrest, except to now ask for a meeting with Brink. The prisoner has drawn a mysterious puzzle, which prison psychologists believe may hold the secrets to her crime. The Puzzle Master gets off to an intriguing start, drawing the reader in as questions abound. However, the complexity of the plot, and the laborious backstory made this a difficult read. The book felt like a mashup of several genres (historical mystery, occult, horror, religion, to name a few) that just muddled the plot, and was confusing instead of interesting. Just a little too much going on here to truly enjoy the story. I received an ARC of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book sucked. Not only was it unnecessarily convoluted without payout, it didn't even lean into it's far fetched concept enough to be believed.

When I started reading The Puzzle Master, I was certain I was going to love it. It was reading like the Robert Langdon-Silent Patient mash-up with gothic haunted house vibes I didn't know I always needed. But as the book progressed, the more of a slog it became and the less I was able to engage with it.

It starts off well: We meet Mike Brink, a puzzle constructor who was diagnosed with sudden acquired savant syndrome after a traumatic brain injury. This rare medical condition allows him to see patterns in everything, giving him a unique ability to both construct and solve puzzles. He has been called to a New York State women's prison at the behest of a psychiatrist whose patient, Jess Price, hasn't spoken a word since she was arrested for the murder of her boyfriend. But now Jess has a message for Mike, one that will draw him into a complex ancient puzzle and a deadly game with the highest possible stakes.

At first, this was such an exhilarating read. Incorporating excerpts from Jess's journal and letters written by a mysterious doll-maker more than a hundred years ago, I was on the edge of my seat and eager to see where Danielle Trussoni was taking me. But she just kept throwing more and more into the plot, until it became incredibly muddled and esoteric. What began as a puzzle adventure with intriguing historical elements became a jumbled plot involving quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and several religious aspects. All interesting topics -- but they did not all belong in the plot of this book. It seemed like Trussoni just kept introducing new ideas and then promptly discarding the previous ideas.

I also found the characters to be very flat, and I didn't at all buy the instalove plotline (or feel entirely comfortable with it, it's kind of problematic) -- both of which would've been easier to forgive if I had remained as engaged with the book as I was at the start. Those issues, in addition to several plot holes and the chaotic nature of the plot, made this a disappointing read for me. Thank you for NetGalley and Random House for the complimentary reading opportunity.

The author definitely did her homework on the many, MANY, subjects discussed in this novel. Her research was thorough enough and deep enough to have written this as a non-fiction textbook of Hebrew myths, writings and legends, and coding using binary numbers. In fact, that is exactly how this novel did read.

In the first quarter of the book, we are introduced to Mike Brink, who, through quirk of fate and an accident to his brain, has acquired savant syndrome. He can solve puzzles, any puzzle. He is the Puzzle Master. Fascinating premise, and the story starts out great; he is on his way to a prison to try and solve a puzzle presented by a prisoner being held for the murder of her boyfriend. It goes downhill from there sadly.

He doesn't really solve a lot, or really any, puzzles. He's better at visualizing them and then being able to recreate them without notes. After an interesting start, the story devolves into repetitive retellings of Hebrew mysticism and the creation of a golem. The whole middle half of the book was a hard slog to get through because, as I mentioned before, it read a lot like a textbook. We get a lot of history, background, more history. Dry, dry, dry.

Things finally pick up a bit in the last quarter, but not enough to save this story. At one point, our hero's escape the bad guys; they throw a coveted suitcase in the back of a Jeep and take off. Suddenly a bad guy pops up out of the back seat and makes off with the suitcase. Really? You didn't notice a 6' tall guy crouched in the backseat of a Jeep?!

Then there is the 'romance'. Brink spends time with the prisoner Jess twice, for about an hour, and by the end of the story they are deeply in love. Insert eye-roll here.

My last problem is with the title. It shouldn't be called The Puzzle Master as he doesn't really spend the whole novel solving puzzles. It should be called The GOD Puzzle, as that is the focus of this novel.