At the opening of this book a cadaver is discovered, the body of an impeccable businessman from Munich, in an elaborate garden where topiary shrubs delineate a hidden chessboard behind the hedges. The death seems to be a suicide, with no plausible motivation, but then, as the plot of this thriller unfolds, we begin to see that its apparently random moves are variations on an opening gambit, and it can end only in a checkmate that annihilates the possibility of a rematch.

Gary Kasparov has defined chess as "the most violent sport in existence," and that is true in this extraordinary novel, too. For the mortal duel around which it is constructed is between two chess players who are opposed human types - a clever, persecuted Jew and a ruthless, persecuting German - and when they face each other over a chessboard, at first in big international tournaments and then in a Nazi death camp, the stakes are nothing less than life itself.