It was All Souls' Day 1755 and the blind priest had just intoned the Kyrie Eleison in the great cathedral of Seville, the great temple that had been a mosque during the time of the Muslims, when the great earthquake happened.

We know it as the Great Earthquake of Lisbon because that was its epicentre - where the greater part of its victims, some 100,000, lived. But it was also felt elsewhere, including Seville.

Here the great Giralda (a Muslim minaret topped by a Christian belfry) tottered and the bells in it tolled without anyone touching them.

Down at ground level the formidable Doña Julia, owner of one of the principal printing presses of the city, was saved by her negro slave whose native instincts warned her of the coming catastrophe in time.

A stone, dislodged from the elaborate vault, landed on her. It referred to an ancient tradition of the Muslim and Christian communities to resolve any dispute between them ... by means of a game of chess.

Doña Julia had something else to worry about. This was Leon, a man from Malta, who she had recently taken on in her printing press and who had become her lover.

He was from Malta but as a young boy he had been captured by the Turks who converted him to Islam and trained him as a Janissary.

He bode his time and when the right opportunity presented itself, escaped back to Malta.

Here the grand master had a mission for him: he was to go to Seville where his skill at chess was needed.

Centuries back, in November 1248 when the Christians were trying to win back Seville from the hands of the Muslims, Prince Alfonso and the Muslim leader Axataf reached an agreement that instead of waging war on each other, they would hold a series of games of chess and the winner would get the city and the Giralda.

King Alfonso died in 1252 and the outcome was still undecided. Meanwhile the records of the games had gone lost and the Christians were suspecting that the Muslims were tampering with the records and pretending that they were the winners.

There was something else: when Seville was falling into Christian hands the king gave out huge areas around the city to the military orders which had helped in the struggle - the knights of Calatrava, those of Santiago and the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, later known as the Knights of St John of Acre and later still of Malta.

Leon was a member of this section but he could not reveal this until he took his son, Abel, with him to meet the Moroccan ambassador who was on a visit.

Meanwhile they had started sending the boy to a school but on the day when they were to meet the ambassador some boys ganged up and beat Abel.

Going home late at night they were attacked by a masked robber who wanted something from Leon.

Not finding it on him, he stabbed him to death. Just before he died Leon told his son to treasure and hide an ivory elephant chess piece and a Malta Cross given to him by the grand master.

Abel never returned back to the school. Instead, he had private lessons at home.

As time went by he became more intimate with Julita, his cousin, whose father hated all of Abel's family.

One night, coming back drunk from his usual haunt, this cousin, Julita's father, saw an unidentified man coming out of his daughter-in-law's room and he beat her savagely for taking a man in her room.

It was Abel who had gone to warn Julita that he had been accosted while watching a Good Friday procession and the attacker knew of their secret love affair.

The attacker also knew of the ivory elephant piece.

Sometime later, worried because he hadn't heard from Julita, Abel went to her house, and found her brutally murdered along with her two grandparents.

Though they couldn't prove that the cousin was the killer the family concluded he was the killer and ostracised him.

Abel married at long last an eccentric intellectual, and somehow they hit it off.

Then they had a baby, Guiomer, who dominates the rest of the book with her romance with a boy who was an altar boy at her baptism and grew up to be a brigand and her lover.

At the end, and to bring the book to a conclusion, she would be the one to take part in the final chess game. Just before that happens, Abel breathed his last. A spoiler: the Giralda is still there.

The book I have reviewed today is not the most famous of Nerea Riesco's books, though for us it carries the intriguing links with the Malta under the Knights. (It carries on till Malta is invaded and conquered by Napoleon).

Other books by the same author include:

- Il Silenzio dell'alchimista;

- La ragazza e l'Inquisitore;

- Il Vento che sa di Miele e di Cannella;

- El pais de las mariposas;

- Ars Magica;

- Desnuda y en lo oscuro;

- Tempus;

- Las puertas del paraiso;

- Los lunes en el Ritz