The game of thirty

by William Kotzwinkle

A wealthy Madison Avenue antiquities dealer is murdered while playing a game the pharaohs once played - the Game of Thirty. Enter Jimmy McShane, hired to find the killed but instead McShane finds that the killer is playing the Game of Thirty with him, and all of Manhattan is the board on which they make their moves, from the upper reaches of New York society to the lower depths of life around Times Square, where the game takes an unexpected turn, and McShane follows his quarry through a world of high-priced sexual slavery. In this haunting hovel, Kotzwinkle sets his dazzling imagination against the streetwise wit of Jimmy McShane, a private eye for the nineties, a droll philosopher whose insight comes from his having shadowed humanity into its darkest corners. The Game of Thirty is pure entertainment whose inner lining is literature.