The the body of an impeccable businessman from Vienna is discovered in an elaborate garden where topiary shrubs delineate a hidden chessboard behind the hedges. Apparently the death is a suicide without plausible motivation, but as the plot of this passionately colored, coolly controlled thriller unfolds, readers see that its apparently random moves are "variations" on an opening gambit, which can only end in a checkmate that annihilates the possibility of a rematch.
