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In The Puzzler鈥檚 Dilemma, professional puzzle-setter Derrick Niederman reveals the logic behind solving posers old and new

PUZZLES are the gateway drug of the world of mathematics, enjoyed by recreational users and hardcore mathematicians alike. And there is never a shortage of them, from sudoku in newspapers to mind-bending brain-teasers you can find online.

A constant stream of puzzle books is part of this trend. Most of them are just collections of discrete puzzles in a reference-book style, but every now and then someone feels the need to treat the puzzle book like a novel. In creating a narrative they aim to make their book readable in a continuous flow. In The Puzzler鈥檚 Dilemma, Derrick Niederman has taken on this challenge.

Niederman is certainly well qualified to be writing a book on puzzles: he creates crosswords for The New York Times and has invented some well known physical puzzles such as the 鈥�36 Cube鈥� 鈥� the lovechild of a Rubik鈥檚 Cube and sudoku.

It should come as no surprise that Niederman would want his book to have overarching links. Puzzle writers, unsurprisingly, enjoy setting out to solve their own challenges. The whole book is a kind of meta-puzzle for Niederman in which the aim is to arrange and join together his puzzles.

The first chapter is a lovely scaled-down version of the book as a whole, itself listing a series of puzzles that form hints for a chapter-spanning enigma. The chapter on simplicity and 鈥淧ersian flaws鈥� 鈥� deliberate imperfections left by an artisan 鈥� contains the author鈥檚 own Persian flaw; these clever layers give the book a chance to be more than the sum of its puzzles.

Unfortunately, Niederman has overshot the mark, wrapping his enigmas in too many layers of tangential stories. I am happy to read about classic Knights and Knave puzzles, in which the former always tells the truth and the latter always lies, without needing a sugar-coating of pop-psychology about human motivations. In his ever-meta-style, he even acknowledges that the reader will be relieved at no longer 鈥渉earing a psychology treatise from a nonpsychologist鈥� before he segues into a 鈥渟ailing story told by a landlubber鈥�.

Though the book sometimes lurches between such stories, if you hold on for the ride there are some engaging expositions on classic puzzles, such as the Towers of Hanoi, in which you can waste hours of your life moving different sized rings from one pole to another. There are also puzzles of his own creation: how would you turn 鈥淩ESIST鈥� into 鈥淪ISTER鈥� via exactly 12 swaps of adjacent letters?

This book is appropriately best described in tautological terms. If you like this sort of thing, then this book is the sort of thing you will like. For the soft-core puzzlers, The Puzzler鈥檚 Dilemma will still provide a decent hit of brain-tickling. It鈥檚 just a shame it鈥檚 been cut with tenuous ramblings.