King Sacrifice: A True-Life Novel

Fifty years later, this novel reveals one of the best-kept secrets of the 20th century: the secret behind the fall of Bobby Fischer, crowned king of chess in 1972, while the Cold War was raging.

The world chess champion title - a symbol of intellectual excellence - became especially high-stakes during the Cold War. In the shadow of their respective Secret Services, two nations clashed, not on sixty-four squares, but through machinations off the board-a plot targeting the reigning champion, the American Bobby Fischer, considered the greatest player of all time.

King Sacrifice reveals the heinous ploy put into place by the Kremlin to defeat the man who had humiliated the Soviet Union in 1972 by snatching the supreme title away from Boris Spassky. In 1975, that state-led conspiracy led Fischer to abandon his title. Had Bobby Fischer lost his taste for life? Had he lost his mind?

The truth is far more frightening: the parabolic trajectory of a boy from Brooklyn who became an international idol in the world of chess, who spent time in the spotlight before slipping back into the shadows.

They say that behind every great man is a great woman. Recruited by a mysterious Kremlin cell whose existence is revealed in this book for the first time, Olga is the embodiment of Russian genius. She would bring the greatest chess player the planet had ever known to his knees by challenging him on the chessboard of life.

This book describes the king of chess's sacrifice for his queen. The titanic battle between those two heroic figures shook the world as we knew it. Through that battle, the author gives the chess world its honor back, and rehabilitates its deposed king, the fallen idol of his own childhood and of all chess players in the world.

From a very young age, LIVIE HOEMMEL (pseudonym) was initiated into mathematics and chess by his father, who was also a serious chess player. Together they would analyze games played by grandmasters, with a particular interest in those of the greatest of them all: Bobby Fischer. Nearly a half a century ago, the author promised his stunned father - who was almost grief-stricken after Fischer's fall in 1975 - that he would solve the mystery someday.