The Immortal Game

Rating:
Summary: Great Mystery Novel with a Fun Chess Twist
Review: If you love Raymond Chandler's novels, you'll love this book. It is stylishly written, with a good plot and fun characters. It is particularly enjoyable to see how the San Francisco Bay Area is woven into the fabric of the story.

I should add that for me personally the chess theme was a guaranteed hook; I used to play chess professionally and I wrote the Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess. But while the chess aspect of the story is fun, this is really a mystery thriller written as an homage to Raymond Chandler. Read this book because you love a well-written hard-boiled mystery, not because you love chess. (Although loving chess will add to your pleasure!)

A bonus to this book is that there are many inside winks to people who are knowledgeable about Raymond Chandler or the San Francisco Bay Area. Also, each chapter is framed by a photo of some place in the Bay Area, and some of these photos are quite nice.

Rating:
Summary: First-Rate Detective Story
Review: Mark Coggins's "Immortal Game" is a fast-paced, easy-to-read detective novel. The protagonist is August Riordan, a sarcastic private detective who moonlights as a string base player for local jazz ensembles. Riordan is commissioned by a software entrepeneur, Edwin Bishop, to track down and retrieve a virtual reality chess program which Bishop believes was stolen by his former mistress. Riordan bumbles the case, is fired and proceeds to stumble upon clue after clue in true Columbo-like fashion.

There is a lot in this novel to hold the reader's interest. There are jokes, puns and allusions to classic detective fiction. There are intriguing portrayals of San Francisco culture and equally-intriguing, strategically-placed photographs of San Francisco architecture, neighborhoods, and landmarks throughout the novel.

The excerpts on the back cover of the book bill it as a chess mystery. If you are looking for a good chess novel, don't give up on this book. The chess symbolism and chess theme wasn't obvious to me for the first two-thirds of the book. At some point in the final third, I realized that I needed to look up the Anderssen-Kieseritzky match, the 'Immortal Game' of the title. The plot and final resolution of the mystery does somewhat mirror the moves in this famous game. This made this novel all the more engaging. You can find this game, as well as a move-by-move analysis, in Martin Beheim's "Chess with the Masters".

If you enjoyed this novel, you might enjoy another work of chess fiction concerning the Andersson-Kieseritzky game, Poul Anderson's short story, "The Immortal Game."

This book contains one or two fairly explicit descriptions of a sado-masochistic relationship. Some readers may find these passages distasteful. Otherwise, this is an enjoyable, carefully-crafted mystery.

Rating:
Summary: A non-stop thrill ride with plenty of laughs!
Review: This book has a great mystery, plenty of colorful characters, and witty dialog that would make Raymond Chandler jealous. The plot gets very interesting *very* fast, and I found myself really rooting for Riordan to get his man. (A few scenes were downright disturbing, but then again, so were some of the characters.) A great read for anyone who likes a classic detective story!