Ok so this is allegedly the penultimate book in the Insanity series. I just downloaded book seven, because book six leaves you hanging a little bit. According to the author, it’s the only book without a prologue (or two).
The premise of this book is basically a worldwide chess game, and eventually a bunch of other chess games and chess related shenanigans. The Chessmaster challenges the leaders of the world to chess matches. It’s allegedly for charity or something? He tricks them though, because he can’t be beaten, and once you get to your seventh move, you die.
Meanwhile, Alice and the Pillar are traveling all over the world looking for chess pieces that Lewis Carroll made and the White Queen hid. They find a few, and eventually join a living chess game where people actually kill each other. That’s totally not the end though. Alice has to play one final final chess game against the Chessmaster to save the world.
Along the way, Alice, and also us, learn more about her past. She was definitely Black Chess at some point, and she most likely did some bad things. We’re (of course) still trying to figure out what the hell happened in the past, and in Wonderland, and how it relates to now.
We still somehow don’t know if the Pillar is bad. Throughout this book (and the series), he flip flops back between bad and good. Apparently he can walk on the white and the black tiles on the chess board!