Technically, they’re novels. But what bestselling author Danielle Trussoni writes are riddles, wrapped in mysteries, hidden inside enigmas.
“The Puzzle Box,” the second installment in Trussoni’s Mike Brink thriller series, was published Oct. 8 and introduced a puzzle-filled mystery that feels like an inheritor to “The Da Vinci Code,” where the arcane and the logical meet (and lead to twists).
Most pop culture detectives have their schtick — and Mike’s is that he’s a reluctant genius. Following a high school football injury to the head, Mike was diagnosed with acquired savant syndrome.
This is a rare neurological condition that results in previously neurotypical people suddenly acquiring new skills — plus, a compulsive need to display them, per a 2021 paper by published by the Wisconsin Medical Journal.
Mike’s compulsion is solving puzzles that are more complicated than Wordle (and Quordle, Octordle or Sedecordle, for that matter).
This leads him to take on the increasingly dangerous challenges of “The Puzzle Master” (2023) and its sequel, “The Puzzle Box” (2024).
“The Puzzle Box” by Danielle Trussoni
“Finding an actual medical condition that allows humans to transcend the limits of our brain just fascinated me,” Trussoni tells TODAY.com. “He’s not a superhero. It takes an enormous toll on him psychically and emotionally to do what he does and survive.”
“The Puzzle Box” continues the format laid out in its predecessor — a mix of myth, magic and mental gymnastics. This time, the story unfolds in Japan and involves made-up secrets of a real-life imperial family.
Mike has to solve a series of — as the title would suggest — puzzle boxes, which are intricate wooden objects where subtle pieces have to move incrementally to open. In this case, they’re lethal: A single misstep could mean a finger is lost or poison is released.
The book is sprinkled with actual puzzles for the enthusiastic reader to tackle along with Mike — though Trussoni says her own appetite for puzzles only goes as far as Wordle.
The novel was inspired by the “transformative experience” Trussoni had working in Japan as an English teacher for two years before attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She’s had an idea for writing a book set in Japan for 20 years.
“I wanted to write something that that was really interesting for people to sort of voyage there, (like) armchair traveling, but also where people could learn about Japanese history in a way that they hadn’t before,” she says.
For those who are familiar with Trussoni’s work, which includes the acclaimed “Angelology” series and “The Ancestor,” her Mike Brink books are familiar — even if they’re more conventional thrillers.
All of her books read like they’re from the imagination of someone who has spent a lot of time in a library and found secrets hiding in plain sight, but where no one else was dogged or curious enough to find.
Her “Angelology” duology was an epic fantasy series in a world where nefarious angels roamed among humans, the secrets of their race hiding in old correspondence and scholarly theological texts. “The Ancestor” was a Gothic novel about a woman summoned to her ancestral castle, only to learn the secrets embedded in her DNA.
Trussoni calls her seven published books “excavations” that ask “questions about what it means to be human and where we come from, and spiritually, who we are, although it manifests in these very, very interesting forms.”
“There’s this element of history and the mystical, and how the past informs the present,” she says of her books. “These ancient, archetypal questions.”
With the success of the Mike Brink series, Trussoni is still getting used to being considered a thriller writer, given her history of more esoteric epics.
“I think that writing is writing, and that those categories are really a kind of contemporary invention to have a place to shelve these things in the bookstore. Nobody was categorizing writing as horror in the 19th century. ‘Dracula’ wasn’t considered horror. Mary Shelley wasn’t considered a horror writer. They were writing these books that defied boundaries,” she said.
Looking ahead to her next novel in the series, Trussoni considers whether being more like Mike Brink would be helpful in her fiction-writing process. “Putting together a complicated plot is like putting together a jigsaw — looking for everything to fit,” she says.
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