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Sinister Graves, Girl Gone Missing, and Murder on the Red River — by Marcie Rendon

My wife recommended Marcie Rendon and her character Cash Blackbear, and I binged Sinister Graves (2022), Girl Gone Missing (2019), and Murder on the Red River (2017)—in reverse order as it turned out.

Set in the Vietnam era upper Midwest—the border of Minnesota and North Dakota near Fargo and Moorhead—the novels feature Renee “Cash” Blackbear, a young native woman who made her way through a series of bad foster homes to an independent life. She spends nights working on farms, then playing pool at the Casbah and other venues. She’s rarely without a cigarette or a long-necked Budweiser and she’s got a married lover. She’s in college at Morehead State and she’s the informal ward of the local sheriff, who recruits her to look into various crimes: a dead farmworker, a missing college student, and the body of a young woman found after a flood.

Rendon explores Cash’s anxieties about her background but

shows her resilience in facing them and her toughness in facing down criminals. Rendon uses the crimes and Cash’s narration to comment insightfully on native and rural issues of the time.

A highly recommended series and I’m looking forward to reading the fourth book, Broken Field

The Boy With Six Fingers by Barry Vitcov

In this novella, Barry Vitcov introduces an ensemble of characters who mature like fine wines. The central character is the quirky Seymour S. Seymour (“called me Sy”), a red-beret-wearing senior citizen who befriends young man nicknamed Wink and his family. Wink enjoys polydactylism—in this case an extra middle finger and Sy explains that it makes him exceptional, like having a triple-decker name or wearing a red beret. Sy passes on early in the book, but he leaves a legacy of influence. Vitcov introduces us to Wink’s parents, Mel and Sylvie, his wife Sylvia (nicknamed Pinky), his children the judgmental Seth and the happy-go-lucky Boyd, and various others: a retired teacher, a Beatle-s quoting waitress, Sy’s grandson Stanley. Each character gets their own short chapter. The arc of the story involves a tragic shooting, an anonymous confession, and the coming together of the characters at a celebration commemorating the 50-year anniversary of Sy Seymour’s death. Reflecting on Sy’s influence, the characters discover much about themselves and the power of connection. Vitcov has a special talent for depicting a wide-range of characters and bringing them all together in a seamless whole. You’ll enjoy this uplifting story.

Trial by Ambush by Marcia Clark

Read this one for my book club. It’s an intriguing true crime story ripped from the headlines of the 1950s.  Clark is somewhat clunk as a writer–often interjecting herself into the story for no reason–but she’s done a fine job of researching the history of the Barbara Graham case and has a good eye for interesting historical details.

Graham, who became known as “Bloody Babs,” was a petty criminal with a lousy background—unloved and in and out of reform schools. In 1953 the thirty-year-old Graham was involved in a robbery that resulted in the murder of a 64-year old widow in Burbank and she became the main attraction of a media circus treating her as a femme fatale. Prosecutors withheld crucial evidence and Graham was executed in 1955 in San Quenton prison. It’s a cautionary tale of media sensationalism, prosecutorial misconduct, and sexism.

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Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster. By Susan Polgar (Grand Central, March 2025)

Susan Polgar with Mikhail Gorbachev and Anatoly Karpov at the Chess for Peace event in Lindsborg, Kansas.

Susan Polgar’s Rebel Queen is a sparking memoir by the oldest of the famous Polgar sisters, the Hungarian siblings who changed the public face of chess. Arriving just in time for Women’s History Month, the story begins with an educational experiment carried out by their father, Laszlo Polgar, who thought he could stimulate genius by training children from a young age in something the child enjoyed. Susan enjoyed math and chess—but liked chess more ever since she stumbled across a chess set thinking the pieces were toys.

With his wife Klara’s help, Lazlo trained young Susan, coaching her systematically with puzzles and at the age of 4 she was off to the chess club, beating all manner of players and winning the first of many tournaments.

The book recounts the many difficulties she and her family faced—and faced down—in competing not just with other players but with the rigid ideologies of the communist system, with the Hungarian chess establishment, with antisemitism, and with sexism. The government of Soviet-dominated Hungary did not take to Susan’s being homeschooled by her parents, even though they were licensed teachers. The chess establishment did not think she should be allowed to complete in boys’ and men’s tournaments, and Women’s Grandmaster Zsuzsa Verőci, once Hungary’s top female player, tried to stymie young Polgar’s career. But by 1984 Susan became the top ranked women player in the world, at the age of just 15. The international chess association FIDE was often unhelpful, once awarding all women players except Polgar 100 bonus rating points, their twisted logic being that Susan had gained her points playing men so had already benefitted from their higher ratings.

Susan Polgar persevered, remaining ranked in the top three for the more than twenty years. In 1986, she became the first women in history to qualify for the Men’s World Chess Championship cycle, she won the World Blitz and Rapid Championship in 1992, and was the Women’s World Chess Champion from 1996 – 1999.

She was also a chess teacher and coach. When her younger sisters Sophia and Judit came along, she helped train them as well, and the trio  came to dominated chess Olympiads (the Olympics of chess), beating the Russians. She recounts the bad behavior of some male players, when they lost to her, but also some whose attitudes about women in chess were changed by her success.

Polgar eventually emigrated to the United States, found her life partner, Paul Truong, and her passion to be a chess coach, first at Texas Tech University, where a new administration did what academic administrations do (cut the funding), and later at Webster University where she enjoyed a nearly ten-year run as head of the Susan Polgar Institute of Chess Excellence (or SPICE) and led her teams to seven consecutive Final Four Championships. We learn about her coaching style and techniques, and about her interests in travel, languages (she is an Esperantists), fitness, and fashion.

Polgar with Boris Spassky

It’s not just about her. Along the way, Polgar also treats readers to glimpses of some of the chess greats of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Mikhail Tal (who showed her “nothing but warmth and kindness” at an early age and “peppered [their blitz] games with jokes and funny observations,” Boris Spassky (who exhibited “wry, knowing humor”), Victor Korchnoi (who told her not to let the chess authorities destroy her), and Bobby Fischer (who introduced her to his Fischer Random chess and became a good friend until his antisemitism drove them apart). Also featured in anecdotes are Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, Wesley So, and more, but there is not so-much inside chess as to get in the way of the story and Polgar does a nice job a narrating her games as dramatic sporting events, without the clutter of games scores and diagrams.

I would have liked a bit of a postscript on sisters Sofia and Judit Polar, the younger siblings who became Susan’s first pupils. Bit it turns out they have autobiographies as well, so I’ll have to check them out. In all, Rebel Queen is the engaging story of a trailblazer who changed the face of chess.