🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.9/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Check & Mate yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Mallory Greenleaf used to love chess. At eighteen she’s done with it, working as a mechanic to keep her sick mom and two younger sisters afloat, and the last thing she needs is to be dragged back to a chess board as a favor for her best friend. She goes anyway. She accidentally beats the world chess champion. And then everything gets very complicated very fast.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Setup
Easton needs one more player for a charity tournament and won’t stop asking. Mallory shows up, gets paired against Nolan Sawyer, forgets to use the chess clock because she’s nervous, and somehow wins anyway. Then she runs home. The chess world proceeds to lose its mind.
A fellowship offer shows up at her door the next day. Real money, more than she’d make in years as a mechanic. She says no because she needs something stable and guaranteed. Then she gets fired. She says yes.
She shares an office with Oz. She starts winning. An article comes out implying she and Nolan are together because Cox, the second-ranked player in the world, blamed a bad tournament on prioritizing his girlfriend and everyone assumed that was Mallory. She finds his address online, shows up to demand a retraction, and finds him feverish and barely functioning. She ends up taking care of him, falls asleep next to him, wakes up tucked into his side, freaks out, and leaves.
He starts texting her chess advice after that.
Getting to Know Each Other
They’re slowly becoming… something. She makes it to the Challenger tournament as a wildcard invitee rather than someone who earned her way through the rankings, which is its own thing to deal with. She loses to Cox. She solved the mortgage problem with the prize money and should be relieved. She’s gutted instead.
Nolan asks her to be his second, his practice partner for the grandmaster final. She agrees. They spend a lot of time together. They start sleeping together.
The Dad
The full picture of why Mallory carries so much comes out piece by piece. Her dad was cheating on her mom. Mallory found out and told her mom. He got kicked out. They were estranged for three years before he died in a drunk driving accident. She has been blaming herself for everything her family went through ever since. She didn’t cause any of it. But that’s not how grief works.
The Fellowship Fallout
Cox is outed as having cheated against Mallory. Cox releases a video denying the cheating allegations, points the finger at Nolan, and claims Nolan paid for Mallory’s fellowship and engineered her spot at the Challenger. Mallory didn’t know about the fellowship. She completely loses it on Nolan and says some genuinely awful things, including that his family hates him and now she does too.
Which is a lot. Even accounting for her history with her dad and how complicated money and chess are for her, that reaction is hard to defend.
Oz shows up at her place and says what needed to be said. Nobody lied to her. She was never entitled to know where the fellowship money came from. She never actually asked. She’s been keeping secrets from everyone around her while expecting full transparency from him, and she doesn’t have a good answer for that.
She then proceeds to spiral, snaps at both her sisters and her mom, realizes immediately what she’s done, apologizes, and retreats to her room. Her mom follows and tells her something she’s needed to hear for a while: the family has been fine. They can manage without her holding everything together. It’s time she went back to chess.
Turns out only her twelve-year-old sister was supposed to know about the chess career. She was meant to keep it secret, but told her fifteen-year-old sister and their mom.
The Ending
Mallory decides she’s going to the grandmaster final. She’ll be playing Nolan. The whole family comes to watch, Easton shows up, and Mallory and Nolan sort things out before she sits down at the board. She wins. During the match she finally understands something about that very first game that started all of this. Nolan didn’t lose carelessly. He pushed that match to its absolute limit because he was genuinely excited to find someone who could actually match him. That’s not nothing.
They’re together. She’s playing chess again, this time on her own terms. Her family is okay.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥 — Not much here. The romance is slow and the book isn’t really trying to be spicy. It’s more about the chess and the family stuff than anything else.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. Mallory winning with her whole family watching is exactly what this book was building toward.
Would I Reread It?
Maybe. It’s not a guaranteed yes but I wouldn’t rule it out.
The Hot Take
Oz telling Mallory to stop being a whiny baby in that confrontation scene was honestly the most satisfying moment in the second half of the book. She needed to hear it and he said it. Good for him.
Who Is This For
Anyone who likes Ali Hazelwood’s formula and wants to see it applied somewhere other than a lab. STEM romance readers, underdog story fans, and anyone who doesn’t mind a protagonist who takes a while to stop getting in her own way.
Where to Get
📖 Physical Book
Amazon | Bookshop.org
📱 Ebook
Amazon | Bookshop.org
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