The plot is, in all respects, implausible but still captivating. Once again, I am surprised by Pérez-Reverte's ability to tell a story. Perhaps both the characters and the narrator fall a bit into bombast, but that's just a bit of overdoing it with the yeast, and nothing more.
What happens is that Julia, a restorer at the Prado Museum, young and beautiful (both a princess and a hero at once), decides to look for a needle in a haystack in a Flemish painting titled The Chess Game… and she finds it. The mystery hidden in the painting (the murder of one of the players, noblemen of the time) would greatly increase its value in auctions. And what could have been just a conflict of interests turns into a nightmare when a diabolical character operating in the shadows decides to play that game with real dead bodies involved.
The implausibility I refer to is in the mathematical perfection with which the plot develops, with the villain executing his strategies and one of the good guys, a chess genius, responding. I say again, none of this matters thanks to Pérez-Reverte’s ability to create strong characters (César, the arbiter of homosexual elegance, or Muñoz, the Sherlock Holmes of chess in the form of a scruffy office worker) and his complementary skill in portraying idiots. Also, as I mentioned, his mastery in leading the story.
The "diabolical" aspect is no exaggeration: the player in the shadows is, like Satan, someone whose fatal wound to his pride leads him to lose himself and others, exercising a seductive power compatible with his refinement in evil. Too much? Novelesque.