The Puzzle Master by Danielle Trussoni

 

This is one of the myriad novels foisted on the world in the wake of Dan Brown and his riff on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, at this point warmed-over and bland while being exaggerated almost to the point of parody. This particular example has that wonderful feature of a few "technothrillers" I've read of managing to get major things wrong when it abuts on fields I know anything about. Implausible and impossible to take seriously, a waste of religion and folklore, rarely makng a step that is not bleeding obvious. The prose is reasonably good, there are some segments in voices other than the main narration, they're handled well. The characters don't any of them seem to be anything like as smart as they or the author want the reader to think they are--though there's some interesting stuff about how the main, who has aquired savant syndrome, has a brain that does some things really really well--in ways that are mostly out of his control--while he himself is emphatically not an intellectual. The ending is especially laughable with 2022-vintage (or honestly 2025-vintage) tech.