In A Pawn’s Game by Julie Lomax, David Morgan wants a fresh start. He moves his family to Chicago, hoping to break his wife Liv away from her habitual affairs. But the Windy City doesn’t offer easy salvation.
Emily, his teenage daughter, is angry in their new home, and David soon notices Liv’s eye wandering towards their neighbor Eric. Not only is his family life falling apart, but he soon discovers his coworkers have stolen his idea and presented it as their own.
David finds peace only during his early morning runs. When David decides to play chess with Lehman, an elderly man he meets in the park, he never imagines that the game will draw him onto the board of a devious serial killer. Each lost piece tears away at more of his life, and casts David as nothing more than a pawn himself.
As he starts to run out of moves in this game of real-life consequences, David must learn to rely on himself and become the king of his own destiny before he loses everything.
David’s “punching-bag” mentality leads to an avalanche of problems, beginning with his wife’s infidelity that now focuses on their new neighbor Eric.
He abandons a long-term job and forces Emily to leave behind her friends and her position on the cross-country running team. David can clearly see that Liv is a problem and that she will never change, but rather than separating from his disrespectful, unfaithful wife, he chooses to make both himself and Emily miserable. When Eric makes a pass at Emily, David has the perfect opportunity and reason to confront him, yet he doesn’t, choosing instead to brood angrily.
It is only after playing chess against Lehman that David begins to understand the need to leave his perpetual defensive position.
Rather than allowing Lehman’s game to completely destroy his life, he begins to devise a strategy of his own. Lehman is clearly the better player, but David refuses to go down without a fight. He begins to control of his own board, taking daring gambits despite the risk.
Julie Lomax’s A Pawn’s Game is a bold psychological thriller where one wrong move can end the game for good. It fuses the elegance of chess with raw human emotion. From a seemingly supernatural chess game to a manhunt for a serial killer, readers will enjoy this cat-and-mouse competition.
