Zugswang

Book review

It is St Petersburg, 1914, and. Dr Otto Spethmann, a famous psychoanalyst, is implicated in the murder of a liberal newspaper editor OV Gulko. A few days later he and his daughter are arrested when a revolutionary dies under similarly mysterious circumstances but Spethman is preoccupied with Avrom Rozental, the brilliant chess master who is due to play the most important competition of his life but is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the forces – political, historical, and sexual – that are holding him in their grasp.

A swift-moving page turner of a thriller and a rich mixture of psychoanalysis, chess, and the politics of pre revolutionary Russia the tension is high and revolution is in the air when Dr Otto Spethmann finds himself at the centre of plots and counter plots where no one is quite what they seem

‘Zugzwang’, is a position in Chess, where a player must make a move but any move he does make will result in his downfall, and of course this is the position in which several of the characters including Tsarist Russia – find themselves.

The writing is excellent and the depictions of revolutionary St Petersburg are so vivid you can almost smell the gunpowder. In addition we are treated to an intriguing Chess game that runs throughout the novel. Zugzwang is a terrific read with an end that doesn’t disappoint. The last paragraphs of this novel are powerful and thought provoking. Historical crime junkies will love it, as will those with a passing interest in chess.