Zugzwang

Zugzwang is a position in chess in which all possible moves make your situation worse. In this intricately plotted novel, Otto Spethmann, a psychoanalyst in 1914 St. Petersburg, plays a long-running chess game with a fellow Polish Jew, the famous violinist Kopelzon, who has lately asked him to treat a brilliant but shattered young chess master called Rozental. But what is Rozental to Kopelzon? In their chess game, in Spethmann's life, and especially in the confusing and murderous revolutionary politics of the last years of Czarist Russia, zugzwang is a constant terrifying possibility. Stephen Lang masterfully manages this huge multinational cast of characters and dauntingly layered plot. Even the author sometimes teeters on the line between complexity and believability, but Lang is unfailingly convincing and entertaining. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

September 10, 2007
Roiling with class tensions and rife with danger, St. Petersburg during the twilight of the last czar serves as the chessboard on which Irish author Bennett (The Catastrophist
) stages this heady historical thriller. The game begins with a bang: the murder of prominent newspaper editor O.V. Gulko in March 1914, just weeks before the city hosts a glittering international chess tournament. (Zugzwang
refers to a situation in which a player can make only moves that worsen his position.) Then there’s a second slaying. Despite plenty of the usual suspects—Bolsheviks, pro-German reactionaries, Polish nationalists—the police start grilling respected psychoanalyst Otto Spethmann and his 18-year-old daughter. The widower’s protestations of innocence cut little ice with his chief inquisitor, Insp. Mintimer Lychev, a mysterious sort who happens to share Spethmann’s chess enthusiasm. Dr. Spethmann’s only hope: using his analytic skills to crack the case. As he races the clock, he and Lychev become caught up in a high-stakes battle of wits. The plot packs more than enough surprises to keep any suspense junkie sated.