I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This started off okay. I liked the premise, and the storytelling was okay, although it felt a little lecture-y at times, with the dumping of a lot of information. But then it progressively got worse and worse. I could put up with fairly stereotypical characters if there's a lot of action going on. But the plot got bogged down by so much information dumping. None of the conversations sound like conversations. They sound like one character lecturing on a topic for pages and pages, before giving the other character an opportunity to ask another question. And even that, I could be okay with. But the instalove between a couple of the characters, not too mention some skeevy yet almost laughable sex scenes, and a mishmash of way too many genres all turned this into something that I just couldn't enjoy because it was all just too much. (I didn't really like any of Dan Brown's novels either, which is what this reminds me of the most, so there's that.)

It's been a long time since I have felt compelled to finish a book in one day....well, The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni, is IT! Super intense and a quick read, I could not put it down. It's a page turner, a roller coaster and an incredible story. I loved this book, truly it had me on the edge of my chair! I loved all the Jewish references! Thank you to NetGalley and to Penguin Random House Publishing for the egalley of this book in return for this very honest review.
For all readers, buy it as quick as it comes out.....It is a fantastic story!

Y'all!!! This book! This book!
Imagine being in the woods and expecting to run into tigers or bears but instead running into a liopleurodon. All that to say, it will keep you on your toes.

I really am a bad guesser. I'm a bad detective. Please don't ask me to solve any crimes.

I really didn't know who to believe or who was telling the truth. It definitely was a fun ride the entire time. It was a stressful ride, but a fun one!

Seriously, don't miss this one!

Thank you to Random House for inviting me to read an early copy of this book.

THE PUZZLE MASTER works with three different timelines: 1909, 2017, and 2022 (our main one).

From the beginning, I thought that if the book’s execution worked out, then this was going to be really good. I’ve read Danielle Trussoni’s ANGELOLOGY series so I was familiar with her writing style and it comes across here. Yes, this book is classified as Historical Fiction and Mystery & Thrillers (according to NetGalley’s rubric), but there’s a lot more going on here. There’s an investigation of privacy, quantum mechanics, Jewish mysticism, and a few others as well.

(A note about the Jewish mysticism mentioned above: I’m not Jewish so I’m not sure if this was taken with any sort of care. There were a few things that felt suspect, but I can’t speak with any authority about whether or not it was done in poor taste.)

This is a dense book. There’s a lot going on and you can really tell the author did her research on every topic; the characters go on long monologues to demonstrate this. This information does pay off but it feels like it’s bogged down in parts. While I’m one who can tolerate this, I know there are those who won’t.

In the end, basically, everything is not what it seems and I liked going into reading it knowing that there was going to be a sequel.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a readers copy of this title. My reviews never contain spoilers and are freely given.
This book is a fast paced, with action start to finish. There are stories within the story, a doll maker, a diary of an accused murderer. Add in golems, a puzzle called The Eye of God, and a cool little dachshund. Overall a perfectly balanced read.

The Puzzle Master is a fast-paced ride. The book is built around Mike Brink, who, after an accident in high school, can understand shapes and patterns like no one else. He’s a likable character who doesn’t always know how to navigate the world around him.

He finds himself inside a centuries-old mystery that involved Jewish mysticism combined with a tech genius who hopes to move the world to the next age of AI. Sound confusing? It is. But it is a well-spun yarn that keeps you guessing. Kudos to the author for all the research she did. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think it is for everyone.

If you enjoyed The Davinci Code, this book is right up your alley!

This was a face paced and keep you on the edge book. I really enjoyed it based on the synopsis I was ready to go in and found there was so much more to this book than I expected. It ended on a cliff hanger and await a sequel and most definitely will read it!

3.5:5

Despite the delicious and savory intricacies of the story, this book ended up being bland for me. It needs just a bit more spice and possibly different ingredients. Overall it satiated but didn’t satisfy.

(2.5 rounded up.) The Puzzle Master was a book about a lot of subjects: puzzles, the supernatural, religion, technology, art, history, medicine. There was a lot going on; perhaps, too much for one book.

While I thought it was fairly successful as thriller, adding so many other elements from different genres tended to distract from, rather than enhance, the overall story. I’m sure there are people who like the mash up of genres, but I think you need to be careful which ones you mix together. A lot of people enjoy thrillers with puzzles but hate anything supernatural.

I also thought the writing was a little uneven. I’m a fan of fast pacing, but sometimes I thought it was a little too fast. I had to go back a couple of times and reread things to make sure I hadn’t missed something. Plus, there were a few things I didn’t miss, they just weren’t addressed. I was also glad I had the dictionary feature on my Kindle for this book.

My copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to the the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review it.

One word. Amazing.

This book follows a man with a unique ability to create and solve almost any puzzle that comes his way. When he receives a request to solve a puzzle from an inmate at a state prison, he has no idea what kind of adventure he is about to start.

This book is part thriller, part horror, part historical fiction and so much more. I loved how this delved into the history and mystery of well know wonders like Porcelain while weaving it seamlessly into the twisty and engaging story.

It is hard to truly write a review for The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni that captures all the emotions that this book sparked.

The Puzzle master was an incredibly different type of book. Puzzles AND murder!? Yes, thank you very much!

The Puzzle Master is one of the most weirdly uneven novels I’ve ever read. It reads to me like an unedited first draft. There are flashes of brilliance--there’s a legitimately spooky haunted house sequence that had me up past my bedtime and frantically texting my boyfriend. However, unfortunately this book is just spread too thin to be effective at any one of the seven things it’s trying to do.

It’s trying to be about technology, and mysticism, and puzzles, and trauma, and possession, and it’s a gothic Dan Brown thriller historical mystery mash up. Even a modern day Shakespeare might blanch at trying to accomplish all that. And this author is not Shakespeare. The convoluted plot is hung like an albatross around the shoulders of characters that barely have space to breathe let alone develop into anything other than one dimensional stereotypes. The prose is workmanlike. I think the author has potential if she could get a better editor and maybe stop trying so hard to be Dan Brown, and instead cultivate her own voice.

In the end, when you put together seven half-baked ideas, you just end up with a mess. The ending also left me somewhat skeeved out about questions of how consensual some of the sex was.

I was given an advance copy by the publisher in exchange for this (perhaps overly) honest review.

This was a fun read! This book was a little of several genres: thriller, mystery, horror, suspense. I do love puzzles and the mystery in this book kept me going. Some of the religious aspects of the puzzles lost me, but I was intrigued enough to read on. Highly recommend!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Mike Brink suffered a traumatic brain injury on the football field that turned him into a puzzle prodigy. Several years later, he's swept into a mystery as big as life itself when he receives a puzzle from a woman convicted of murdering her boyfriend.

But when Mike meets Jess, she opens up to him when she hasn't said anything to her therapists before. Together, they have to solve the God Puzzle and prove Jess innocent.

Unfortunately, while the premise for this story is fascinating, this book just didn't really do it for me. There was a lot going on. There were times I couldn't keep track of characters and sometimes puzzles were described in too much detail. A lot of information about characters, however, was unnecessarily repeated time and again.

I also didn't find Mike Brink to be a particularly likeable guy. He was a hot quarterback who got injured and gained, essentially, a superpower. And for some reason we're supposed to feel bad for him. I feel bad that he's still stuck on what happened to him in highschool.

The central mystery of this book isn't revealed until half way through. I was interested in how everything would play out, but a lot of the discussion of regarding religious history, symbolism, and codes was over my head.

I think this will appeal to a lot of other people, it just wasn't the one for me.

Wowza! I did not expect "all that" when I picked up this book! No need to know too much prior to going in. You have a man who has a savant level ability to work out puzzles. He is wrapped into some major intrigue and get's put in the middle of a lot of drama, but with his intellect, will he be able to help resolve the issue at hand?

This felt similar to The Davinci Code, which I think would have helped set my expectations going into it. I didn't quite know where this roller coaster was going and was abruptly jolted at times with some of the plot point. I loved the concept and intelligence behind the book. A story that I can't work out on my own without reading it is always a winner in my book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the complimentary e-copy of this book.

I could not stop flipping through the pages. A face paced read with lots of action and twists at every corner. Danielle Trussoni’s work building is fantastic and keeps you enthralled. Thank you Danielle Trussoni, NetGalley and Random House Publishing for this great ARC!

Acquired savant syndrome is both very real and very rare. For some people, a traumatic brain injury can actually cause extraordinary new abilities—be they scholarly, artistic, musical, or otherwise. This is what happened to Mike Brink, the protagonist of Danielle Trussoni's The Puzzle Master. And while he's found a way to make use of these abilities while appeasing their unpleasant side effects, said abilities and coping mechanisms are about to lead him down a twisting path of mystery, conspiracy, and strange spirituality.

Mike's brain injury may have ended his football career, but it's turned him into a puzzle master... whether he likes it or not. His tendency to see formulas in everything is debilitating, but he's focused it into both solving and creating puzzles. These puzzles have caught the attention of Jess Price: once a renowned author, now serving a prison sentence for murder. She's as keen on puzzles as Mike is, but she's dabbling in things far beyond her pay grade.

After visiting Jess and receiving some odd encoded messages from her, Mike soon finds himself fully tangled up in her world. She visits him in steamy dreams and seems to remember these encounters. And her diaries from before her arrest take him even further down the rabbit hole... into a world of golems, religious puzzles, doll-making, and demons.

The Puzzle Master is intriguing in that it hides its hand early on. It would have made for a perfectly serviceable crime drama with a reluctant detective at the helm. But as it opens up bit by bit, it brings more and stranger fascinating turns into play. By the end, what looked from the outside like a Rubik's cube has opened up into a complex and thrilling Lament Configuration.

Trussoni has a masterful storytelling style that is evident throughout The Puzzle Master, keeping the reader engaged as the story travels across multiple interlocking narratives. That said, the first few chapters are a bit infodump-y, cramming Mike's story into several rounds of oddly placed exposition. Trussoni's characterizations of everyone else, especially Jess Price, flow naturally into the narrative. Perhaps it's a narrative choice: a more structured, up-front exposition for the highly logical Mike to set him apart from the rest of the cast. Unfortunately, for readers new to Trussoni's work, it sets up an expectation that this is how all exposition will be approached. It is not, though, and pushing through this first series of chapters leads to writing that's much more rewarding.

For the most part, the story is compelling. Much as Mike is pulled down unexpected rabbit holes, so is the reader. What starts as a deep dive into the history of porcelain making turns into a conspiracy of Biblical (literally) proportions. The comparisons to The Da Vinci Code seem a bit unfair; Trussoni's work is much more respectful of and grounded in the ancient puzzles and mythologies it references. And while the plot does inflate to potentially affect Life As We Know It, the story still remembers who and what is at its core. Brink's affliction is never truly treated as a blessing. We are never allowed to forget the true trauma of having your entire life and worldview suddenly altered forever. As much as Mike can feed and appease his sudden genius, we also see his longing for normality, for his brain to stop behaving in the way that's earned him so much admiration. It's a very compassionate approach that I was pleased and relieved to see at play.

Sadly, I'm not in a position to discuss my favorite aspect of The Puzzle Master, as even bringing it up would give away a portion of the surprise twist ending. Suffice to say there's a nice bit of mirroring that hints at the true solution to the high-end puzzle Brink finds himself working with.

If you're a fan of puzzles, history, and Judeo-Christian mythology, The Puzzle Master is worth your time. It's an intriguing ride which, while it does stumble at the starting line, races strong to the finish and keeps you guessing from chapter to chapter.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Random House Publishing Group- Random House for an advance copy of this book filled with conundrums, head scratchers, thrills and secrets that nobody should ever try to solve.

Games Magazine was a periodical that i used to love getting in the mail when I was young. I would start right at the beginning and felt super smart when I could figure something out, and really dumb when I had to look at the answers. Today I still do crossword puzzles, never got Sudoku, and when feeling like Mr. Burns in the Simpsons will do an occasional Jumble. The best thing about Games was that the if one couldn't solve the puzzle, the answers were at the back of the book. Something the lead in The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni doesn't have the option for, and the puzzle he is solving, might change the world forever.

Mike Brink was once a promising football player till an accident ended his career but gave Brink something more. Brink could see puzzles in his head and could both construct them, and solve them, a gift but a curse as well. Solving puzzles was suddenly easy, but life became a construct that seemed to elude him, something he could puzzle out, leaving him alone. Brink receives a strange message from a therapist at an institute that handles dangerous prisoners. One patient, a writer who committed murder but has not spoken in over five years has made created a puzzle, with Brink's name on it. The inmate, Jess Price, offers Brink something he thought he would never find, a difficut puzzle with roots stretching back almost 900 years, and a person who is as much an enigma as the puzzles she gives him.

A clever, twisty story full of questions, and conundrums, with a bit of supernatural tossed in. The story is laid out well, beginning very mysterious and going at that same pace. Brink is an interesting character, along with his dog, and the puzzles unfold carefully. There is a lot of descriptions about Brink's height and his not looking like a puzzle nerd, which after awhile can be a little tiring, but the story really holds up well. People might want to compare it to Dan Brown, but this is a lot more thoughtful, better written, with characters who seem alive. A summer read for the beach that makes the reader think and care.

For readers of Danielle Trussoni's previous book, this will go over well. Also a good introduction for new readers, to get a feel for Trussoni's style and ideas. For fans of Katherine Neville, Donna Tartt, even Michael Crichton.

I don’t think this was a bad story but I don’t think it was a good fit for me.

There was a lot going on, too much at times, that I had a hard time connecting to it. I didn’t really feel a connection to the characters and I felt like the characters’ connections to each other weren’t fully earned. I think that can be the trade off with a complicated plot.

Sometimes there was so much going on that a lot of little things get brought up once and seem important to the story but never mentioned or explained again, while other aspects felt like they were revealed more than once.

I think the premise was interesting enough though, it brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table, and I think it will find it’s audience.

The Puzzle Maker is a fantastic and such an intelligent book that I highly recommend.
it’s a mix of thriller, mystery, suspense, sci-fi, drama and so interesting, that will keep you hooked the entire time.

Thank you Maddison Dettlinger from Random House Publishing Group, the author Danielle Trussoni, and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Coming out June 13, 2023.