ARTURO PEREZ-REVERTE – The Flanders Panel. Harcourt Brace, hardcover, 1994. Reprint editions include: Bantam, paperback, 1996. Vintage Books, softcover, 2003. Harvest Books, softcover, 2004.

   I was looking forward to great things from The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte but  — alas! —  found myself bitterly disappointed at a book filled with cardboard characters, a painfully obvious “surprise” killer, and endless pages of talky explication for a climax.

   These shortcomings (and many others) stand out all too sharply against a plot of striking intelligence; Julia, a beautiful young art expert, is commissioned to restore a renaissance-era painting of a Duke and Knight playing chess while the Duchess looks on in the background (Perez-Reverte describes this painting so vividly the reader can almost see it in brilliant color and sharp focus) but stops abruptly when x-rays reveal a message hidden under a layer of paint: “Who killed the Knight?”

   For the answer, she recruits a small band of friends and friends-of-friends (all, alas, as two-dimensional as Julia herself) to reconstruct the game on the painting and discover who took the Knight by playing it backwards. Which works fine until her friends themselves start getting killed by someone who leaves little notes with chess moves on them.

   It’s a dandy idea for a mystery, and I only wish Perez-Reverte had given it a worthy execution. As it was, I saw the Killer come marching down Main Street with a big brass band, but for some reason the author thought he needed twenty-odd pages of “… then I did … but you never suspected I  …” to put it across.

   Equally bad is his tendency to imply something very very clearly, then go ahead and state the obvious in case we missed it. So we get a couple paragraphs where Julia’s older-woman, sexually predatory (and two-dimensional) employer looks with a proprietary air at young man, extols his sexual prowess, then Perez-Reverte adds, “He was the latest in her long line of lovers.”

   Or several lines describing Julia’s ex-lover/former teacher, a cliche’d College Professor who wears tweed jackets with patched elbows, knit ties, and sandy hair graying at the temples, and Perez-Reverte caps his description by saying that “he looked like a stereotype of a professor.” Well du-uh.

   Reading this is like sitting at a great feast of words and being tossed the scraps; it insults my intelligence, and I’d take Perez-Reverte to account for it, if I weren’t afraid of him. As it is, I’m going to give him another try, this time with lowered expectations.