Zugzwang
By Ronan Bennett
Bloomsbury £14.99
FT bookshop price: £11.99

Spring 1914, St Petersburg shivers. Fortunately, our narrator’s voice is lucid, measured and intelligent. He is the psychiatrist Spethmann, who first appears as a complacent survivor in a world of justified paranoia but is soon revealed to have his own passions – dangerous ones. His tone of dry analysis only heightens our awareness of the ever-encroaching dark.

A terrorist outrage may occur at a chess tournament, and the moves of a chess game are a tense motif. Action of a more dramatic kind flows as the story reaches a crescendo of dizzying complexity. The wonderful character of Lychev, a policeman both villainous and honourable, is one of many threads that draw the end on. Too soon.

A classy treat.