Thopughts at the half-way point of The Luneburg Variation

This starts feeling like a murder mystery novel with a top chess player found dead at his home. But it quickly moves into other territory. You fear that you might need to know stuff about chess as the story moves into talk of grand masters and learning moves but the characters that Maurensig describes carry it through. As the end game begins you want to know where it goes.

Although this book comes from an author living in Italy and the action is set in Vienna the location is not perhaps as important or as pronounced as other European literature. That's because the action and the moves largely take place on a chess board which is a plain of action that is of course not fixed to a single location.

Final half of book and overview in a review soon...