The missing piece - Antoine Bello

Since its invention in the 1780s, the jigsaw puzzle has had its ups and downs. In the late Nineties, US billionaire and media mogul Charles Wallerstein decides to revive its fortunes by setting up the International Speed Puzzle Circuit. Players compete to solve a puzzle in record time, while millions watch on the stadium screens or on their TV sets at home. It's the ultimate, riveting spectator sport, bigger than football, basketball or Formula One. The prize money, cost of TV rights, advertising revenue are all vast. More is at stake than the fortunes, or even the lives of the players. When a serial killer starts targeting key players on the circuit, suspicion falls on the reactionary old-school puzzlists, both those who fondly recall the Good Old Days, when the whole American family would gather round the hearth over a classic ocean liner, as well as the abstract East Coast theoreticians, who see the puzzle as a metaphor for everything from nuclear fission to the theory of crowds. The killer's habit of removing one of each of the victim's limbs suggests he is putting together a macabre puzzle of his own. The police need to find the vital missing piece, that philosophical element without which the whole of the rest of the puzzle has no meaning. Antoine Bello's prizewinning detective novel is a satirical, comic 48-piece jigsaw puzzle. The solution lies in the reader's hands.