Puzzle Fiction

My new obsession is puzzle fiction.  I fell in love with Robin Sloan’s Sourdough — he’s the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  It feels a little bit like a food-focused Mr. Penumbra (as opposed to “book-focused”).  So I looked up his website and signed up for his newsletter, hoping he had another book in the works.

One of the newsletters in the archive covered a genre he calls puzzle fiction.  They’re books that sometimes contain a mystery, but they’re not a conventional mystery.  Think The Westing Game.  (Or, really, anything Ellen Raskin.)  They’re more like verbal sudoku or puzzle solving, and he gives a few examples including the 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton) and Gnomon (Nick Harkaway).  Both sound so cool.

I was trying to find other books that fit this genre, books that contain a central puzzle, but they’re not straight mystery.  Maybe Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious series?  Or John Green’s Paper Town?  Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murder?  (That last one may be too much of a mystery-mystery than puzzle fiction.)  As Sloan says, “they just have to be interested in the processes of puzzle-making and puzzle-solving as well as the mental state—not unpleasant—of being puzzled.”

What else would be on this list?