On the morning of March 24, 1946, the world chess champion Alexander Alekhine was found dead in his hotel room in Estoril, Portugal. He was fully dressed and wearing an overcoat, slumped back in a chair, in front of a meal, a chessboard just out of reach. The doctor overseeing the autopsy certified that Alekhine choked on a piece of meat, maintaining that there was no evidence of suicide or foul play.

Some, of course, have commented that the photos of the corpse look suspiciously theatrical. Others have wondered why Alekhine would have sat down to his dinner in a hot room while wearing a heavy overcoat. And what about the rumors concerning Alekhine’s anti-Semetic activities during World War II? Is it true that his homeland, Russia, considered him a traitor, as well as a possible threat to the new generation of supposedly superior Soviet chess masters?

With the atmosphere of a thriller and the insight of a poem, Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows leads us through the life and death of Alekhine: not so much trying to figure out whodunit as using the story of one infuriating and unapologetic genius to tease out that which the novel alone can discover.

. For readers of Laurent Binet’s HHhH