Andy Soltis, GM, prolific author and NY Post & CL columnist, herewith gives birth to a new genre - the chess whodunit. This novel really is novel. He limns an isolated New Mexico town where a rich patron has endowed a super-GM tournament, sixteen years into the future. He peoples it with crotchety locals and eccentric chess stars of both sexes. And then, one by one, they start to die unnatural deaths.

Such catastrophes do not put an end to the chess play, which the author excerpts with sprightly and imaginative games and positions that we players can follow with pleasure. Since I did not recognize them (unlike the Spassky-Bronstein game, e.g., in the opening scene of the film "From Russia with Love"), I guess that Soltis made them up. The majority of uninitiated humankind will have to learn chess or skip them over. Detective work by the chief amateur sleuth, the tournament director, alternates with chess, until the outcome of the mystery is revealed.

I shall have to leave the whodunit criticism to aficionados of that field. The chess is fun, the atmosphere exotic to us city folks, even those who visited Lone Pine, the quirks of the characters not alien at all. I have not seen the book, having read it on the web. They should advertise it as "the first chess whodunit" by which I mean that actual, skillful chess play is integral to the text, and probably the only one we are likely to see for a very long time. As such, it is a most original achievement.

(Footnote: murder is practically unknown among chess-players, violence rare. Introduction of chess at the Rhode Island State Prison for the Criminally Insane a half-century ago markedly reduced fighting. Of course, the occasional frustrated chess widow may throw a plate or two. For which I never blamed her, if it was a cheap one.)