Codebreaking Meets Romance in Bay Area Author’s New Novel
According to recent psychology and neuroscience findings, revisiting the things we loved as children, like play, contains cognitive and physical benefits. For author S.C. Godfrey, returning to a children’s book she once loved generated creative inspiration for her new thriller, The Enigma Challenge.
Godfrey, who lives in the Bay Area with her husband and their two sons, can still recall childhood visits to an aunt’s house where she’d frequently pore over Kit Williams’s 1979 illustrated book Masquerade. The book was filled with riddles and puzzles that, when pieced together, led readers on a real-life treasure hunt for a jewelled golden hare the author had hidden somewhere in Britain. It is widely credited as a progenitor of the armchair scavenger hunt craze.
Godfrey never solved it herself, but she’s thankful the internet later made it possible to discover who did. She’s also grateful for how reflecting on that childhood memory as an adult acted as a writing prompt.
“I had this idea of returning to what I love,” the author explains to KQED in a recent interview. “I thought about that book and I was like, ‘Okay, what if the characters are finding something in a book that they can solve real-life riddles for?’”
The Enigma Challenge opens with 30-year-old Zoe Wilder, a postdoc who studies ciphers at the fictional Bay Area university Chessmont, attending the International Conference on Cryptology in Madrid as a first-time paper presenter. Attendees (an eclectic crowd of security experts, hackers, and academics) are abuzz about a puzzle challenge known as the Enigma Challenge, made up of five puzzles that, once solved, point to an undisclosed but rumored-to-be-big cash prize.
Zoe is drawn into participating by two highly motivating factors: the dramatic dissolution of a toxic relationship with her boyfriend-slash-boss, who begs her not to get involved with the challenge, and her own natural puzzle-solving bent. (Godfrey describes Zoe as someone for whom “‘too difficult to solve’ is an invitation not a threat.’”)
Without fully understanding what she’s signed up for, Zoe becomes the first to solve the kickoff puzzle, and everyone in her vicinity receives a mass text that announces the challenge has begun. Fellow participants become enemies who converge upon her with lethal intent, and force her to take on an unlikely co-solver: Dane Seaver, her ex’s notorious academic rival, who is, unfortunately, an equally mysterious puzzle. What’s more, he’s also “unattainable leading man level” attractive.
While Masquerade had visual puzzles, Godfrey utilizes ciphers and text-based puzzles better suited to a novel. This required extensive research, including Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh’s Code Breaking: A Practical Guide, which she calls a “source text” for the book’s puzzles. Godfrey even joined a cryptography Facebook group to pose questions about ciphers — a move with massive payoff. “It turns out that Klaus is the moderator there,” she says.
Klaus emailed the author and invited her to a Zoom with Elonka —a world-renowned game developer and cryptographer, who best-selling author Dan Brown named a character after in his The DaVinci Code sequel (as an anagram, naturally). When Elonka prompted the author to put the puzzles from the book in their Zoom chat, “she solved them immediately,” Godfrey remembers with a laugh.
The exchange with the “puzzle genius” was a confidence boost, and proof that the puzzles she’d crafted for her book could be recognized and solved. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is great because they’re not that hard, but they’re hard for normal people, but she’s not a normal person.’”
If reading about puzzle-solving sounds boring or reminiscent of the much-mocked Sherlockian “mind palace” retreats, Godfrey’s execution dispels those fears. Godfrey has Zoe run readers through a range of cipher varieties so the uninitiated are quickly caught up; there’s the Caesar, Patristocrat, pigpen, homophonic, polyalphabetic, columnar transposition and so on. Readers could theoretically solve the puzzles if they wished, but the novel is written in such a way that allows them to follow along without participating. The story’s action is propelled by the high stakes and time constraints of the challenge: Six days to solve five puzzles across three countries, or face being knocked off by fellow prize-hunters unafraid to employ underhanded and sometimes violent maneuvers.
This thriller is so self-assured it doesn’t read as a first-time genre entry; Godfrey’s previous books, A Very Typical Family (2022)and The Second Chance Hotel (2023) — published under the name Sierra Godfrey — were both romances. For The Enigma Challenge, “I wanted a couple on an adventure, and I wanted it to be twisty and turny, sort of Mr. & Mrs. Smith-ish,” she explains.
She recounts the moment during the drafting process when she knew she was on the right path. “[It’s] around the middle of The Enigma Challenge and the lights go out. I kept returning to that scene, to that little bit of writing. It was the tension and heart pounding and urgency … I was like, this is it for me.”
Essential to the book’s effectiveness is the central romance between Zoe and Dane. Their back-and-forth banter, the employment of endearingly cliché genre tropes (there’s only one bed, fake dating) and prioritization of the female lead’s interiority all reflect an understanding of the romance genre and its audience. Likewise, the story’s balance of fast-paced action sequences, romantic development, a colorful cast of criminal side characters and an unspooling mystery gives The Enigma Challenge a cinematic scale and pace akin to Robert Zemeckis’ ’80s classic Romancing the Stone.
Like many modern blockbusters, The Enigma Challenge ends on a cliffhanger. But Godfrey’s next book isn’t a direct sequel. “It’s a separate story within the same world and the characters are related,” she teases. For those looking for a diverting experience, this first installment satisfies all criteria for a summer action movie or beach read.
‘The Enigma Challenge’ is out Aug. 11, 2026.