Game of Thirty, The - Softcover

Meet Jimmy McShane, private eye: street-smart, female-ogling, smart-mouthed, sharp-dressing--well, you know the type. (Picture Bruce Willis in the movie version.) His sidekick is Jane Henderson, a quick-witted, Rollerblading--and yes, gorgeous--chiropractor with such this-must-be-the-'90s obsessions as herbal healing and aromatherapy. (Demi Moore, perhaps?) This is one of those books that make you wonder why they didn't just go straight to the screenplay. Lots of great New York scenery, from uptown to Chinatown to the bowels of 42nd Street, lots of colorful stock characters, lots of scenes that sound like they were written with a film crew in mind. The plot itself is enjoyably silly, for a time, involving the annoyingly leering yet brashly endearing McShane in a quest for the killer of a Madison Avenue antiquities dealer who specializes in ancient Egyptian artifacts. His client is the dealer's daughter, Temple (picture Julia Roberts in one of her trademark damsel-in- distress roles), who has legs that won't quit and a confused, little-girl-lost demeanor that keep our hero's heart thumping and pull him deeper and deeper into the mysteries behind the perfectly composed masks of his upper-crust suspects. The book's title refers to an Egyptian board game that is said to reflect the state of its players' lives and handily serves just this purpose in the novel, predicting each move the characters make in a gamelike plot. If that's not enough to clue you in on what will happen next, there's plenty of author-supplied foreshadowing. Unfortunately, the mood devolves from over-the-top good fun to something darker and decidedly unfun during the latter half of the book, and the denouement, despite all the hints, comes as a too preposterous and sentimental letdown. Kotzwinkle (The Exile, 1987, etc.) is best here when he sticks to wisecracking skepticism and avoids the TV-movie drama. (First serial to Esquire; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When a first-class mainstream writer turns his hand to genre fiction, the results are seldom mediocre. They're usually either spectacular or awful. Like Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon (1977), Kotzwinkle's venture into crime fiction is first rate, a delight to read and a successful attempt to expand the horizons of the genre. Making masterful use of the first-person narrative form common to most hard-boiled detective fiction, Kotzwinkle introduces Jimmy McShane, who is hired to solve the grisly murder of a shady dealer in rare antiquities. Pitted against a killer whose methods include cobra venom and disembowelment, McShane is joined by Dr. Ann Henderson, a chiropractor and aspiring sleuth. It turns out that the deceased was killed while playing the Game of Thirty, an ancient Egyptian board game, and that the killer is playing the game with Jimmy, using all of New York City as the board. Played by the pharaohs, the Game of Thirty is designed to parallel an individual's journey toward either life or death. Laced with a liberal measure of Kotzwinkle's signature wit, this multileveled story is imaginatively constructed and populated with an engaging menagerie of characters both fair and foul. Unique and compelling. Elliott Swanson