The Flanders Panel
Restoring a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a chess game between a duke and a knight, a young Madrid art restorer named Julia finds a hidden inscription beneath the varnish: Who killed the knight? The question is not idle; the knight in the painting was murdered two years after it was painted, and the game on the board, when played backward, seems to point to his killer. As Julia pulls in her friends, a flamboyant gallery owner, an eccentric child-prodigy chess player, and her old mentor, the chess puzzle begins pushing itself off the canvas. People around her start to die in ways that echo the moves on the board. Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel is a literate, coldly elegant thriller that uses chess, art history, and obsession in a cross-century murder mystery.
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Madrid art restorer Julia Sarmiento is cleaning a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of two noblemen at chess and uncovers a hidden message asking who killed the knight. The dead man is the painting's patron.
The Flanders Panel was written by Arturo Perez-Reverte and originally published in Spanish in 1990. The English translation was released in 1994. Perez-Reverte is also the author of The Club Dumas.
Both novels involve historical mystery and art. The Flanders Panel (1990) significantly predates The Da Vinci Code (2003) and is widely cited as a more literary forerunner of art-history-mystery thrillers.
The Flanders Panel is 306 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Flanders Panel takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Flanders Panel is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Flanders Panel is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
