Playing Games

Q: Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

No, you don’t have to buy the ebook to participate, but we do recommend it to get the most out of your club. There are several premium social reading features that are only available when you buy the ebook, like annotations, reactions, comment threads, resources, discussion prompts, and more, all embedded right in the text. It’s a unique and immersive way to read.

Q: Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

It’s annoying, we know. App store rules prevent us from selling directly in the app, so for now you can only purchase ebooks on our website. Don’t worry: when you purchase an ebook on the web, it’s automatically added to your bookshelf in the app.

Q: How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Kindle is a straightforward e-reader; Fable is an interactive e-reader that includes social features inside the ebooks. When you read an ebook on Fable, you can see and react to the text with others in real time. Start a discussion, share highlights and quotes, add emoji reactions—all of it lives right inside the book. It’s hard to explain and easy to see, so we recommend reading the free sample in one of our most active clubs to get a feel for it.

Q: Do you sell physical books too?

We do not sell physical books at this time. Wish we did? Let us know why here!

Q: Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

Most of our clubs are completely free to join. The only exceptions are clubs marked as “Premium” or “Career Development,” which do require a fee. You can find out more on each club’s detail page.

Q: How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

The first step is to download the Fable app. From there, you’ll be able to create your own private or public book club and invite others to read with you. Once your club is created, click on the plus sign under “Currently reading” and search for this book to add it to your club.

By Lawrence Block & Elaine Kagan &

Publisher Description

WIN, LOSE, OR DIE.

Whether it's child's play or for the highest stakes, whether we stick to the rules or cheat, we all play games — for fun, for thrills, for love or money, to prove we're the best or make an opponent knuckle under. And the games we play, with cards or dice or nothing but our wits, reveal something deeply personal about the players.

In this powerful new anthology, Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Lawrence Block has assembled an all-star team for the ultimate game night. Sit down at the checkerboard with S.A. Cosby, assemble jigsaw puzzles with David Morrell, or play marbles for the fate of the world with Joe R. Lansdale. In Jeffery Deaver's hands, an innocent game of Candyland takes twists the Parker Brothers could never have imagined. Science-fiction grandmaster Robert Silverberg uncovers painful truths about destiny while betting on the turtle races in a Caribbean resort. And Lawrence Block himself out-Hitchcocks Hitchcock with his classic story of murder victims swapped by strangers on a handball court.

From hide-and-seek to Russian roulette, from mahjong to Mouse Trap, it's a game lover's dream — but beware: your turn is coming, and while winning isn't everything, sometimes losing can be deadly…

And here's Publishers Weekly's starred review:

"One of the most impressive of the 17 crime stories involving games in this stellar anthology from MWA Grand Master Block (In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper) is Block's own "Strangers on a Handball Court." It riffs on Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, as the title suggests, and provides a wholly fair plot with a gut-wrenching surprise. Even knowing that multiple twists are coming doesn't negate their impact in Jeffery Deaver's devious "The Babysitter," which opens with a classic trope: the innocent everyperson who stumbles on a deadly secret. When the charges of 17-year-old Kelli Lambert get bored playing Candy Land, Kelli's search for another board game leads her into peril after the parents of the kids she's watching suspect she's spotted their secret plans to torch a casino so they can establish their own casino. David Morrell shines with the subtle and creepy "The Puzzle Master," in which a couple become addicted to jigsaw puzzles by a particular artist, only to find potentially ominous clues linking disparate bucolic scenes. The wide range of stories and games in them begs for a sequel."

Download the free Fable app

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

2 Reviews

4.0

Ann Stader

Created over 1 year ago

Sam Sattler

Created over 1 year ago

“I have been a fan of Lawrence Block's books for a whole lot of years, but Playing Games has somehow managed to make me appreciate him now more than ever. Block invited sixteen authors to write short stories, each of them centering around the common theme of making a specific game the core of their story, and it appears that all of them were eager to respond with one. The result is seventeen (Block contributed the last story in the book) really good tales - all of them written in 2023. Quick Aside - I got a kick out of the book's "About the Editor" section, a career biography obviously written by Block himself, because of this sentence beginning the section's second paragraph: "In recent years, Lawrence Block has found a new career as an anthologist, having realized how much easier it is to dash off an introduction while inveigling others to supply the actual stories." I love that. The "bigger" names contributing stories to the collection are probably Block, S.A. Cosby, Robert Silverberg, Jeffery Deaver, and Joe R. Lansdale. Surprisingly to me, none of the five authored one of the stories I most enjoyed - although Cosby came very close. One of my favorites is Tod Goldberg's "Paladin," one of the longest stories in the collection. It tells the story of a cop's best friend who is lost at sea while attempting to rescue a distressed vessel. I was particularly impressed at how much like a full novel this one reads, with so much information and so many twists packed into relatively few pages. Another favorite is "Lighting Round" by Warren Moore. "Lightning Round" is about a man who loves from afar the woman who is running the Trivia Night game at his local pub every week. He has given it his best shot, but she has firmly rebuffed him and now he just comes to the weekly game to see her. But once he begins to suspect that she has serious boyfriend trouble, something very clever and dramatic is about to happen on Trivia Night. Similarly, David Morrell's "The Puzzle Master" puts an entirely new twist on jigsaw puzzles and those who illustrate the boxes and puzzles. One couple, new to puzzling but loving it, notices a pattern in one artist's puzzles when they go back and begin to work them in chronological order. What they learn makes them suspect that a serious crime is being hinted at - and they decide to solve a whole different kind of puzzle for themselves. The best thing about Playing Games is the consistency of the work. I've read a whole lot of short story compilations, and their biggest flaw is almost always the same: three or four really great stories, a bunch of average ones, and two or three real stinkers. Playing Games, on the other hand, is made up almost entirely of very good stories, with a handful of excellent ones and only one real stinker (which will remain nameless). If you're a crime fiction fan but are new to reading crime fiction short stories, I can't think of a better place to begin.”

About Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His newest book, pitched by his Hollywood agent as “James M. Cain on Viagra,” is The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. His other recent novels include The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr; Hit Me, featuring philatelist and assassin Keller; and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film, A Walk Among The Tombstones. Several of his other books have also been filmed, although not terribly well. He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and has just published a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners, The Crime Of Our Lives. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) And the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.