Danielle Trussoni’s 'The Puzzlemaster' (2023): A Page-Turning Over-Explainer
Puzzle me this, bitches.
Have you heard of Danielle Trussoni? I hadn’t, until sometime this past summer after seeing one of her novels recommended on a list somewhere of newly released thrillers. I finally received a copy on Libby after making my way through the long waitlist. She’s a New York Times bestselling author with deep ties to the organization itself as one of their former journalists, which plays interestingly in the plot of her latest novel, The Puzzlemaster.
Mike Brink, the protagonist, is a former high school football player who, through an accident on field, acquires a savant level of rare genius: a propensity to figure out puzzles unavailable to others, as well as a photogenic memory. Eschewing both academia (good for him) and industry jobs, Mike works instead as a puzzlemaster for—you guessed it!—The New York Times. He’s famous in that role, but the book wants you to revel in his fame by sometimes referring to him by his full name out of the blue as (in my eyes) an unmerited hero-making.
The crux of the story involves Mike helping a young writer, Jess, held in a woman’s prison for the murder of her boyfriend some years ago when she was housesitting a mansion filled with creepy dolls. She draws Mike’s attention with a puzzle that seems unsolvable at first, a God Puzzle. Is she an actual murderer? Or is there something more sinister, more supernatural going on here?
As a somewhat elevated Dan Brown, the novel holds the reader’s hand throughout, overexplaining to the point where it seems that Trussoni doesn’t trust her reader. When chapter 16 begins, for example, Mike reflects on the concluding events of the preceding chapter. There is some interiority but also just straight recounting of the plot. He thinks, for instance: “There’d been a call from Thessaly’s supervisor, his visitation privileges had been revoked, and he’d be arrested if he returned.” Compelling stuff in the moment as they occur, not so much in the immediate recounting. It might be due to my propensity to avoid commercial fiction, but I find this sort of narrative tick irritating.
There are some instances of somewhat banal telling rather than showing, such as: “As if that wasn’t bad enough, Connie was gone, and he had no idea how to get her back.” A human who has just lost his dog, his best friend, would simply not react in such phlegmatic terms. The novel anchors itself in the current moment of our technological revolution with questions of AI and consciousness. Compelling stuff. But the fact that it ends on a cliffhanger elicits an effective eye roll from me. It’s difficult not to be cynical in reading a book like this and assume that it’s simply a fleshed out script just waiting for a film deal, which it did, in fact, receive. I’m not against a novel that leaves open threads to explore in a sequel, as long as the novel concludes by fulfilling its initial promise. Here, it is not a lingering thread to flesh out in the next text, but the actual plot of this novel that remains unfinished. It feels like I read the first half of the novel and I’m not sure if I’ll continue with its second half.
French mistake: Months are not capitalized and no need to add a comma in between month and year! I’m looking at you, “24 Décembre, 1909.”
Unrelated rec: I’ve been thinking about a film I watched on Sundance long ago entitled Amreeka (2009, Cherien Dabis). The film explores the difficulties of a Palestinian family immigrating to the US post 9-11. It’s funny, touching, and moving. For fans of Alia Shawkat (best known as Maeby from Arrested Development), catch her here in the role of the protagonist’s niece. Here is the trailer. It’s not streaming anywhere, but if there is enough demand, maybe this film will help ground geopolitics in individual stories—which is the power of art, no?