The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni

I first heard of The Puzzle Master from Catherine on Sarah's Bookshelves podcast. Catherine and I are pretty in sync (except for her obsession with mythological retellings), so I thought this might suit me. 

Mike Brink suffered a brain injury playing football that left him with an incomparable ability to create and solve puzzles.  He's just living his life with his dog Conundrum (Connie) when he's asked to go visit Jess Price, a woman in prison for murdering her boyfriend. Price's psychiatrist asks Mike if Mike can solve some of the puzzles Price is creating. And the next thing you know, we're in a more literary da Vinci Code. 

Look, call me basic. I don't care. You know what? I have fond memories of listening to the audiobook of The daVinci Code driving from Minnesota to Michigan and back. I liked this book. Did I actually understand what was going on? Not for most of it, no. LOL. Was I able to solve the puzzles? Absolutely not. But did I enjoy every page of it? YES. Yes, I did.  I'm going to read the sequel, too.

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

...it had been his father's truck, one of the few things he'd held on to after his death, and he couldn't bear to let it go. It broke down all the time, but Brink accepted the truck's flaws the way one accepts the weaknesses of a beloved old dog: with tolerance and a sense of the end, sad but inevitable, looming ahead. (page 18-19)

Everything about this passage made me sad.

He didn't trust her. Anyone who didn't allow dogs in her house had something wrong with her. (page 149)

Preach it. 

Things I looked up:

harmonic divisor number (page 32) 

To start, I have to explain harmonic numbers. The n-th harmonic number is the sum of the reciprocals of the first n natural numbers. Starting from n=1, the harmonic sequence is 1, 3/2, 11/6, 25/12,...

A harmonic divisor number is a positive integer whose divisors have a harmonic mean that is an integer. Consider the number 6. It's divisors are 1, 2, 3, and 6. To figure out the harmonic mean, you'd take 4 (the number of divisors) and divide by the reciprocals of each divisor. 

Since the result of 2 is an integer, 6 is a harmonic divisor number!

triangular number (page 32) - counts objects arranged in an equilateral triangle

Størmer number (page 32) - positive integer n for which the greatest prime factor of the number squared plus one is greater than or equal to 2n.

The first few Størmer numbers are:

1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, ...

So if we look at the number 5 for instance, if we square it and add one, we get 26. The prime factors of 26 are 1, 2, and 13. 13 is the largest and that's greater than 2 x 5, so it's a Størmer number. 

magic number in physics (page 32) - a number of nucleons (either protons or neutrons, separately) such that they are arranged into complete shells within the atomic nucleus. As a result, atomic nuclei with a "magic" number of protons or neutrons are much more stable than other nuclei. The seven most widely recognized magic numbers as of 2019 are 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126.

As this has veered off from math, I have no idea what this means. 

Mersenne Prime (page 38) - I knew this sounded familiar. I looked it up in this review. 

Bard's Fisher Center (page 136) - Performing arts theater in Dutchess County, New York with an odious design by Frank Gehry

kepi (page 206) - a French military cap with a flat top and horizontal brim

Lindau Gospels (page 257) - an illuminated manuscript in the Morgan Library in New York, which is important for its illuminated text, but still more so for its treasure binding, or metalwork covers, which are of different periods. 

Book of Hours (page 257) - Christian prayer books, which were used to pray the canonical hours. The use of a book of hours was especially popular in the Middle Ages, and as a result, they are the most common type of surviving medieval illuminated manuscript. 

Abraham Abulafia (page 257) - born in 1240, a major Jewish mystic, and the founder of the ecstatic Kabbalah (I could not tell from the book if this was a real person or not!)

Ricardian contract (page 318) - as invented by Ian Grigg in 1996, is a method of recording a document as a contract at law, and linking it securely to other systems, such as accounting, for the contract as an issuance of value

Hat mentions (why hats?):

Brink picked up a photo and saw a portly man with a neat beard, one arm around a woman with a large-brimmed hat decorated with stuffed birds...(page 148)

They removed their overcoats and their hats and joined us at the table. (page 199)

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Was that too much math? Would you read a book like this?