The Puzzling World of Winston Breen

Eric Berlin’s middle-grade mystery novel The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (2007) is the first in a trilogy of books that center on a preteen puzzle solver and amateur sleuth. Berlin builds his mystery around a wide variety of moderately to very difficult number, letter, word, geometric, and logic codes and puzzles that the reader can solve alongside his characters. (To avoid writing in the book, readers recommend printing blank puzzle printables from Berlin’s website; answers to all the puzzles are in the back of the book.) Some critics point out that the puzzles break the tension built by the plot, which revolves around the search for a valuable ring by a misfit group of townspeople.

Twelve-year-old Winston Breen is obsessed with puzzles. He sees patterns and ciphers everywhere and often designs his own puzzles for fun, especially every year for his sister Katie’s birthday. However, when she turns 10, Winston forgets to make her a puzzle. Instead, he buys a last-minute gift from Penrose’s Curio Shop, a favorite store whose owner Mr. Penrose is another puzzle fan. When Katie opens the ornate box Winston has bought, she assumes there is a puzzle inside. Soon, she finds a false bottom under which are four wooden pieces with different color words on them. Winston swears he didn’t put them there, and the whole family tries to solve the riddle without much luck.

Mr. Penrose tells them that he bought the box from the estate of Walter Fredericks, the long-dead very rich and eccentric inventor that used to live in their town. By a coincidence, Winston’s best friend, Mal, is researching Mr. Fredericks for a history report and knows that Violet Lewis, the town librarian, is one of Mr. Fredericks’s children. At the library, as soon as Mrs. Lewis sees Winston pull out the puzzle box, she starts crying and yelling at him.



Winston and Mal go to their friend Jake’s baseball game, where they meet David North, a puzzle enthusiast who tells them that the box is one of four—the reason Winston couldn’t solve it is because he needs the other four sets of puzzle pieces to work with. North has one of these sets, and so does Mickey Glowacka, who finds the boys in their favorite hangout, Rosetti’s Pizzeria. Glowacka informs the group that the puzzle pieces lead to a treasure worth possibly more than a million dollars. That night, Mrs. Lewis visits Winston’s house to apologize for her behavior, and revealing that she has the fourth puzzle box. She explains the origin of the treasure hunt. Mr. Fredericks devised it as a way of reuniting his four children whose childhood disagreements led to adult estrangement. If they put the four puzzle sets together, they would find a valuable ring given to Mr. Fredericks by a Jordanian prince as a thank you for inventing a therapeutic mattress.

That night, someone breaks into Mrs. Lewis’s house to try to steal her part of the puzzle, and she calls her neighbor, retired policeman Ray Marietta for help. Together, they decide to unite at the library with North, Glowacka, and the Breens to hunt for the treasure together. Their first meeting attracts a neighborhood reporter, Brenda Bethel, who is covering the story after speaking to Mrs. Lewis about the renewed interest in the Fredericks mystery. While the group convenes, Jake and Mal discover that North and Glowacka must already know each other from a treasure-hunting convention.

With Brenda’s help, the group figures out the next piece of the puzzle: Salvatore Rosetti, the pizzeria owner. Rosetti doesn’t have the ring, however—all Mr. Fredericks ever gave him was a set of old envelopes. Appalled when Glowacka accuses him of stealing from Mr. Fredericks, Rosetti doesn’t want to help the group at first. Eventually, though, Marietta convinces Rosetti to give the envelopes to the group.



Meanwhile, Marietta asks Officer Stokes, a friend on the police force, to use fingerprints to figure out who broke into Mrs. Lewis’s house. Marietta suspects North and Glowacka, but the fingerprints Stokes lifts from their coffee mugs don’t match those found at Mrs. Lewis’s house. That leaves Winston as the most likely suspect.

Winston solves the word clues in the envelopes, which instruct the group to find Doctor Dilemma. From their research, Jake and Mal know that Doctor Dilemma was Mr. Fredericks’s nickname for his assistant, Dr. Grady Dilmer. However, when the group finds Dr. Dilmer’s house, his son Zach tells them that his father died five years earlier. Zach Dilmer knows that his dad had some of Fredericks’s envelopes. He finds three and gives them to the group. Inside, the clues feature numbers instead of letters, but Katie figures out that the numbers stand in for letters—letters that spell out street names that lead to the intersection of Cheshire and Westland Streets, a dead end. Dismayed, the group gives up the treasure hunt.

That night, Zach Dilmer and Brenda show up at Winston’s house. Zach brandishes a gun and demands that Winston help him solve the final puzzle clue. All along, Zach has held back the fourth puzzle envelope in order to be the one who finds the ring. Winston realizes that Zach is the one who broke into Mrs. Lewis’s house. Using the last envelope, Winston makes a map of the four locations Fredericks had clued: Rosetti’s house, Dilmer’s house, the intersection of Cheshire and Westland, and the office of Gary Rodgers (Fredericks’s lawyer).



Zach Dilmer corners Winston in the library basement, but Winston slips away after grabbing Zach’s cell phone and pushing a book pallet over onto Zach. Winston calls 911 from the phone, and Marietta arrives to save him. Zach is arrested, and Brenda is unmasked as his girlfriend Beverly Munsen.

When the group finally appraises the ring, it turns out to only be worth $60,000—a four-way split of $15,000, or only one thousand dollars less than Glowacka originally paid one of Fredericks’s children for his puzzle box. As the group disbands, Mrs. Lewis tells Winston and Katie never to get to the point where they are no longer speaking to each other.