They Wouldn’t Be Chessmen

The young heir to an Indian throne carries a rope of pearls famous across two continents. When a heartless beauty deliberately ruins the necklace, a quiet, calculating man begins to plot its recovery — and its theft.

His design is flawless on paper. Every move is anticipated, every player set in place like a piece on a board. But human beings are not chessmen. They have passions, fears, and wills of their own, and they refuse to keep to the squares assigned them.

On the sunlit Normandy coast and aboard a pleasure house-boat drifting down the Seine, the elegant scheme begins to slide toward murder. A celebrated detective of the French police, idling away a hot summer nearby, finds its threads tightening around him. To save the innocent and unmask the guilty, he must learn why a perfect plan went so terribly, fatally wrong.