The Secrets of The Chess Machine Reviewed

I enjoy reading good books and could finish 2 books in a week. Yes, you guess right, my home is stacked with tons of books. I just finished this book - "The Secrets of the Chess Machine" by Robert Lohr.

In this debut novel by former jounalist and screenwriter Robert Lohr, an ambitious court officials decides to impress the queen with a marvellous machine tha cn win a chess game against any opponent.

A flaw in the plan: He knows building such a machine is impossibl, at least for now. So instead, he hires a dwarf who also happens to be a chess expert to sit in the machine and act as the auotmation's mind.

Even more unbelievable than the plot is the fact that all this actually happened. German author Lohr was inspired by the true case of one Wolfgang von Kempelen, an engineer who in 1770 presented to the empress Maria Theresia a machanical man.

Dressed as a Turkish magician, the automation could defeat all human opponents at chess. Kempelen then toured it around Europe to widespread the acclaim.

Though The Turk, as it came to be known as, was exposed as a hoax in the late 1850s, almost half a century after the death of Kempelen, not much is known about its early days and who operated it from within.

That is where Lohr comes in. In what is mostly a gripping historical thriller and occasionally a philosophical meditation on Man's love-hate relationship with technology, he introduces the fictional character of Tibor Scardanelli, a ne'er-do-well but pious Italian whose two distinctive characteristics are his short stature and his remarkable chess-playing skills.

He agrees to work for Kempelen after he accidentally kill a man and has to go into hiding - though he finds he has merely exchanged one prison for another.

Deception and intrigue are the name of the game. while a trail of blood seems to dog the hapless Tibor. As the Turk rises in fame, so do the number of people determined to discovere its secret.

When the seductive baroness Ibolya Jesenak, who also happens to be Kempelen's former lover, gets too close to the machine while Tibor is hiding in it, a mixture of lust and fear results in her death, and gives The Turk a new reputation as a killing machine.

This novel is at heart a thriller, and the author's imagination and sleights of hand lead the reader through a mind-game to which cannot help but surrender.