The title of this novel, The Gold Bug Variations, is the first of the many puns interspersed throughout its pages. It brings to mind immediately two fundamental clues to what the book is about, combining an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug" (1843) and a suggestion of Bach's The Goldberg Variations.

It is not accidental that the book has thirty chapters, exactly the number of variations in Bach's composition.

It will not be lost on knowledgeable readers that Bach's variations were based upon four notes or musical phrases. A great deal of this novel is similarly based.

Alert readers will also realize that Poe's "The Gold Bug" is about a piece of paper covered with cryptograms written in invisible ink that become visible only when held close to a source of heat. Pow ers's novel is filled with such cryptograms, the first of which occurs on a...