The Teen Miracle

A young boy from a difficult background shocks a chess tournament by defeating a ruling grand master, an elderly mathematician, and winning a considerable sum of money. Shortly afterwards, the grand master is discovered dead by a lethal injection of insulin, and the boy is suspected for having cheated in the tournament and murdered the grand master who threatened to expose him and claim back the prize.

Summoned by a friend of the grand master and a rival of the boy on chessboard, a former civil servant and a current consultant named Hallan agrees to look at the case. He meets the people involved, and concludes things are not as simple as they were made to seem. Adding to his interest are the fragments of information that the grand master had, once upon the time, helped the intelligence on cryptography, that he was married to a considerably younger and beautiful pianist, that the boy's stepfather is sitting in prison due to a crackdown on drugs mob, while his biological father, a mathematical prodigy of one time, has disappeared somewhere in Turkey, and that the notorious chess tournament was organized and funded by a mysterious Russian-Israeli millionaire, who himself quit playing chess years ago for taking a defeat too seriously. How could anyone cheat in a tournament where everyone played under the watch of numerous onlookers? And who would steal the old chess game notes of the murdered man - who had taken the trouble of adding to his will that in case of his death they should go to the boy he hardly knew, who was now suspected of his death?

To understand where to even start, Hallan will have to figure out the complicated character of the dead man and his antics, as well as means to communicate with the brilliant but indecipherable youngster, who seems strangely content to sit in a prison cell for a crime he probably didn't commit, just playing with his chess set. In order to win a breakthrough in the case, Hallan will have to lose a few games of chess.