The Immortal Game

When the world’s most innovative computer chess software is stolen, wisecracking, jazz bass-playing PI August Riordan is hired to find it.Sifting through a San Francisco peopled with bruising, ex-NFL henchmen, transvestite techno geeks, and alluring, drug-addicted dominatrices, Riordan has got his work cut out for him.But with a smart-ass attitude like Riordan’s, nothing is easy ...A darkly comic sojourn through a town unrecognizable from the Tony Bennett song and the Rice-a-Roni ads, The Immortal Game is a Shamus and Barry award nominee and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year.

Mark Coggins studied creative writing with Tobias Wolff and Ron Hansen at Stanford University and wrote the first story featuring his series character August Riordan in a class taught by Hansen. This story, ＂There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,＂ was later published in The New Black Mask, a revival of Black Mask, the famous pulp magazine that thrived in the 30s and 40s. His books have been nominated for the Shamus and the Barry crime fiction awards and have been selected for best of the year lists compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press and Amazon.com, among others. Three of his novels have been translated for foreign markets. RUNOFF won the Next Generation Indie Book Award in the Mystery/Suspense category, THE BIG WAKE-UP won the Independent Publisher Book Award in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller category and THE IMMORTAL GAME was optioned for a film. His work has been collected for the California History Room by the California State Library and the San Francisco History Center by the San Francisco Public Library. Mark lives in San Francisco with his wife Linda and their cat Taki.