“Is that possible?” asked Cesar. “Can you really judge the character of a person by the way he behaves when playing?”
“ I think you can,” replied Munoz
“ In that case, what do you think of the person who thought up this, bearing in mind that he did so in the fifteenth century?”
“ I’d say” –Munoz was looking at the painting, absorbed—“I’d say these was something ‘diabolical’ about the way he played chess.”

--from The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Chess Stories: Nicki on Bibliobuffet.com
Nicki's review of a collection of novels with chess themes

When two young women in France of 1790 discover the Montglane Chess Service in Montglane Abbey, they recognize its mystic ability to provide anyone playing it with unlimited power and desperately scatter its pieces around the world. But in 1972, computer expert Catherine "Cat" Velis is hired to recover the chess pieces--and is caught up in a nefarious, globe-spanning conspiracy.

The Flanders Panel
by Perez-Reverte, Arturo, Costa, Margaret Jull

A fifteenth-century painting by a Flemish master is about to be auctioned when Julia, a young art restorer, discovers a peculiar inscription hidden in a corner: Who killed the knight? In the painting, the Duke of Flanders and his knight are locked in a game of chess, and a dark lady lurks mysteriously in the background. Julia is determined to solve the five-hundred-year-old murder, but as she begins to look for clues, several of her friends in the art world are brutally murdered in quick succession. Messages left with the bodies suggest a crucial connection between the chess game in the painting, the knight's murder, the sordid underside of the contemporary art world, and the latest deaths. Just when all of the players in the mystery seem to be pawns themselves, events race toward a shocking conclusion. A thriller like no other, The Flanders Panel presents a tantalizing puzzle for any connoisseur of mystery, chess, art, and history.

The Game of Kings
(Legendary Lymond Chronicles, #1)
by Dunnett, Dorothy

For the first time Dunnett's "Lymond Chronicles" are available in the United States in quality paperback editions. The first book in the legendary "Lymond Chronicles," Game of Kings takes place in 1547. Scotland has been humiliated by an English invasion and is threatened by machinations elsewhere beyond its borders, but it is still free. Paradoxically, her freedom may depend on a man who stands accused of treason: Francis Crawford of Lymond.

The Luneberg Variation
by Maurensig, Paolo, Rothschild, Jon

At the Opening of this Amazing fiction, a cadaver is discovered, the body of a wealthy businessman from Vienna, apparently a suicide without plausible motivation. Next to the body is a chessboard made of rags with buttons for pieces whose positions on the board may hold the only clue. As the plot of this passionately colored, coolly controlled thriller unfolds, we meet two chess players -- one a clever, persecuted Jew, the other a ruthless, persecuting German -- who have faced each other many times before and played for stakes that are nothing less than life itself.

Chess Story
(New York Review Books Classics)
by Zweig, Stefan

"Chess Story," also known as "The Royal Game," is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.
This new translation of "Chess Story" brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.

The Defense
by Nabokov, Vladimir 

Nabokov's third novel, The Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault.

Life, a User's Manual(Trade Paperback)
by Perec, Georges, Bellos, David