(I solicited feedback from this wonderful community for a draft of this project eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39972586 ... I was humbled by and am wholeheartedly grateful to several brilliant proofreaders; their names appear at the end of the second chapter.)

_Dimity Jones In Puzzle Castle: An Electronic Escape Novel in Eighty-Nine Ciphertexts_ is a (mostly) fictional story, contained in a single text file, that requires the reader to solve puzzles as they go along, and to use each chapter's solution as a key to decipher the next.

Think: escape room in the form of a novel -- or, as one reader put it, "Interactive Fiction meets Advent of Code."

A computer, and rudimentary coding skills in a language of your choice, will be indispensable for performing the transformations -- and might help with the solving too!

My wife, the author, passed away six years ago. This is not the last thing she wrote, but it is the most unusual, unapproachable, and personal of her major works. It is also, as the only novel of hers that I cannot breeze through in an afternoon (and despite my unflattering appearance in it), my favorite.

Though _Dimity Jones_ was left unfinished, and perhaps abandoned, at the time of my wife's death, its elements were all there, on her hard disk, awaiting only a final compiling. My contribution to this text has therefore been little more than that of an occasional copyeditor (my wife was a meticulous speller and self-proofreader) and playtester.

Thank you for checking it out.