#Domevember #BookshelfSpotlight ‘Puzzle Girl’ by Rachael Featherstone

About the book…

Love is a riddle, waiting to be solved…

Clued-up career girl Cassy Brookes has life under control until one disastrous morning changes everything. When she finds herself stuck in a doctor’s surgery, a cryptic message left in a crossword magazine sends her on a search to find the mysterious puzzle-man behind it.

Cassy is soon torn between tracking down her elusive dream guy, and outwitting her nightmare workmate, the devious Martin. Facing a puzzling love-life, will she ever be able to fit the pieces together and discover the truth behind this enigmatic man?

When a book is blurbed by the amazing Miranda Dickinson, you prick up your ears!

‘Puzzle Girl’ by Rachael Featherstone is out now in ebook and paperback editions from Dome Press. It’s also available on Kindle Unlimited at the moment, obviously the best place to buy it is from Dome, but if you have a K.U sub then reading it there is great too! And if you choose to read or have read ‘Puzzle Girl’, please consider leaving a review,or resharing yours,using #Domevember on social media- thanks so much!

Cassidy Brookes -Cassy to her friends-starts this novel with her feet being swept out form under her-quite literally!-racing to a meeting where she is trying to stop her work rival, Martin, from passing her ideas off as his own again. Sideswiped by life, she finds herself unable to walk and has to submit to being taken to a walk-in medical center to be assessed. Here she finds a puzzle book with a ‘create your own crossword’ puzzle page in it and so begins a cat and mouse chase with a mystery person who starts solving Cassy’s clues, and then writing some of their own…

Cassy is a character who deals in finite answers-she is the most unlikely person to take a gamble on an unchecked puzzle from a charity shop. She likes things to fit the spaces that they are made for, and creates mind games to challenge herself and also to give herself a sense of victory and control that she doesn’t feel elsewhere in life.

So when she has to throw herself on the mercy of strangers, and has been let down so badly in love, it is no wonder that the puzzle of who is filling in her clues intrigues her.

This is a lovely first novel with a unique twist-how do you fall in love with someone you cannot see or whose name you do not know through a crossword puzzle? And does anyone truly know how to fill in all the gaps ? Can a cryptic clue have more than one answer?

I thoroughly enjoyed this very different take on romantic fiction-it was challenging,and thoughtful with a main character that you couldn’t help rooting for. Her control issues lie in solving games to give herself a finite victory that she did not feel in real life. Seeing life as a series of challenges to solve was taken out of her hands by a random stranger who began communicating through a series of clues.

As Cassy races to work out who it is, the themes of women’s representation in the work place, being treated badly by lovers and then expected to just carry on and inequality are explored all juxtaposed with the headlong rush of giving up your control mechanisms to trust fate and fall in love.

You root for Cassy, as you do for her best friend,Dan, who was there for her no matter what. At the end of the book, you feel that the pieces of a puzzle, like life, don’t always neatly fit together but if you work at it, you might solve a larger mystery. It is a funny, heartwarming story that I would highly recommend for lovers of Jenny Colgan and Sophie Kinsella

About the author…

Rachael lives in Hampshire, equidistance from London and the New Forest, her two favourite places. Her short stories have been published in Writers’ Forum, Scribble and Writing Magazine.