3.6 miles. With hills, even. Nisou heard my footfalls on the uphills because there I plod like a dromedary.
Nisou recommended this; it's by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I liked it as faux art history and for the chess, but as a story it fell apart. Spoilers follow. I accept that Europeans, Spaniards in this case, are big smokers, but would any restoration specialist chain-smoke around a painting? in 1990? especially after she removed the varnish, exposing 500-year-old pigment? Also, Julia's working on the painting in her own house instead of a sterile lab struck me as off before I saw how that unlikelihood was manipulated to fit the author's plot rather than the demands of realism.
As with The Da Vinci Code, the unveiling of the villain was no surprise because who else could it have been? I prefer to be amble along a garden path overgrown with ivy and tangled with weeping willow that obscure my sightline, not to be led down a straight path with clearly defined edges. And I wanted the villain and motive to have something, anything, to do with the painting, rather than with a simple homophobic bogey. Unlike The Da Vinci Code, at least no silhouettes glared.
The only sidepath alluded to but never glimpsed was the possibility of more chess and more mirrors: the game on the board, the placement of the figures in the painting on the chequered floor, and the reflection in the mirror. I kept hoping a clue to the game--and I hope the retrograde analysis was correct, because it was fascinating to this non-chessplayer--would be found in the mirror, which might reflect a different game, or different point in the game, than that depicted on the board.
Overall, disappointing, because the same characters and betrayal could have happened without mentioning either painting or chess. But Perez-Reverte uses enough epigrams from Gödel, Escher, Bach to inspire me to tackle that again.