Mike Brink was a rising football star in high school when an accident on the field caused a brain injury that left him with acquired savant syndrome. Now he is a master at making and solving puzzles, but his unique mind has left him lonely and isolated. When he is called in to help Jess Price, a murderer who has remained mute since the crime and who is trying to communicate via puzzles, he’s struck with love at first sight and is determined to help her. Drawn into a game of cat and mouse, he finds he’s involved in a drama where reality and the supernatural collide.

Danielle Trussoni is also the author of the Angelology trilogy. This book’s premise is a bit like The Silent Patient meet the Da Vinci Code, and it does strike that kind of tone. It’s clearly aimed to be an adventure, a wild ride, with a mystery to be solved, attractive lead characters, and puzzles thrown in. Unlike the two books mentioned, this one leans hard into the supernatural, with dreams, Kabbalah, gods, and the fabric of reality… and a lot of other things.

Something struck me early on in reading this book: a few chapters in, this savant picks up a Rubik’s cube and solves it easily. The other person in the room is shocked, amazed… that he can solve a Rubik’s cube? I have had a few friends who knew the trick to those classic puzzle cubes and could solve them in a few minutes. There’s a trick to them and you can Google it. Not savant level.

I didn’t hate this book. It does try to do a little too much, there is a lot of plots and elements and threads and they’re not all handled well or coherently. There is a lot thrown into this book. It made me think of some of the games that came out around the turn of the millennium. It would work really well in that format I think. When he meets the girl and falls for her instantly, and then she kisses him a moment later and he’s seeing visions during the kiss, well, that felt like it would work so well in a supernatural mystery PC game to me.

I found the dialogue pretty bland. The characters feel a bit underdeveloped, and I don’t mind that too much with commercial fiction or with pulp adventure stories, but the author is throwing in some elements that feel like they’re aiming for a more elevated type of fiction, and that needed better characters. The star quarterback who is so handsome but so misunderstood because he’s a genius just felt little too perfect. He belongs in YA fiction. I wonder why he couldn’t just be born really smart, why give him a very rare and unlikely syndrome and a football star backstory? Does it really add anything?

I did really like the way the book is peppered with puzzles. As you read, they’re printed there in the text, and something about this was really cool to me. They were also a mostly puzzle types that I hadn’t seen before and I thought this was pretty cool.

The book really gets a bit out there as it goes on, and there is a god puzzle, demons, dolls, haunted houses, succubus and a lot more. It gets a bit bogged down and lost as it goes along. So I think overall, I did not love this one. But I do like what it was trying to do. It may be one to check out for yourself and make your own mind up about. I can see some people really loving this and some people really getting annoyed by it’s overblown plotting and too many ingredients. I’m more in the second camp, personally.

Read It If: you like Supernatural and The Da Vinci Code, it’s a wild ride with puzzles and more. Might a bit too much more for some.

Thank you to Random House and the author for the copy of this book for review.