The Fire, by Katherine Neville

March 28, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: book review, crime book, Fiction, Thriller 

This is the sequel to the super-hit The Fire, by Kathrine Nevillenovel, The Eight, released more than a decade. I liked The Eight a lot, so I have read all her books since then. But so far, the other books have not been nearly as good. Unfortunately, this is true for The Fire as well. This book, like The Eight, is a filled to overflowing with the essences of history, mystery, chess and intrigue. But it is not integrated in the same convoluted and elegant way. And, besides, why does Neville insist on sticking to the same formula yet again?

The Fire starts out in 2003, in Colorado, where Alexandra Solarin is summoned home to her family’s ancestral Rocky Mountain hideaway for her mother’s birthday. When Alexandra arrives at her mother’s retreat, she finds that she must solve a puzzle to get into the deserted house. It is the first of many puzzles in a danger-crammed, picaresque narrative involving a legendary chess set.

Many characters from The Eight reappear, but the focus now is on Xie, a 12-year-old chess prodigy who has lost a pivotal game due to Amaurosis Scacchistica, or chess blindness.

En route to a rematch that could make her the youngest grandmaster ever, she and her father encounter even greater dangers: evidence that one of those long-buried pieces may have been unearthed, a discovery that leads to her father’s murder. Ten years later, Xie, now forbidden by her mother to play chess, is summoned to Colorado for her mother’s birthday party, but her mother seems to have vanished, leaving behind a series of clues, among them a chessboard laid out with Xie’s last game. Soon other guests arrive, including both the opponent to whom Xie lost that game and a group of neighbors with surprising ties to the world of chess. There are eight people in all, of course. And The Game is on again.

The Game is a quest for a mystical chess service that once belonged to Charlemagne, it spans two centuries and three continents, and intertwines historic and modern plots, archaeological treasure hunts, esoteric riddles, and puzzles encrypted with clues from the ancient past.

It is a book I think many of the fans of The Eight, like me, will want to read. However, it is not a book that captures the same way as The Eight did. For sure, The Fire is written with elegance and sophistication. But the characters don’t catch me the same way. As a literary thriller, this is not quite in the upper echelons of the genre, even though it is good I think I will only recommend this book to people who are already Katherine Neville fans. For others, I am not so sure, but I think it may be a disappointment.

Links to Katherine Neville’s books at amazon US and at amazon UK.

Tags: , , , ,

The Eight, by Katherine Neville

December 29, 2008 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: book review, Fiction, historical fiction, Katherine Neville 

Katherine Neville’s The Eight is a book that transcends genres. It is a work of fiction as well as a crime novel and a thriller. Or it is a swashbuckling adventure, The Eight, by Katherine Neville
a historical mystery, a puzzle, with elements of fantasy thrown in. I still don’t really know. But I think it is a little of all.

The Eight has been compared to the writings of Umberto Eco and Dan Brown, and there is some substance to such comparisons. Like in works of those writers, Cathrine Neville’s plot is big and rich with symbolism and interpretation. The story revolves around an ancient chess set named the Montglane Service. Crafted by a Sufi master in Babylon, it was later given to the medieval French emperor Charlemagne.

The set supposedly has vast occult powers. Its parts have been spread around the globe and there are hidden forces working to find and unite the pieces. Two sets of players, actually. And the struggle for control over the pieces is referred to by them as “the Game”.

The Game spans centuries and generations. It is played out much like a tense game of chess with real players. The key player is Catherine Velis, a financial computer expert. She is sent to Algiers, seemingly as a “punishment” by her firm. However, she soon realized there is much more to it than that. In reality, she is a pawn in a big chess game where the stakes are incredibly high. And, as well, a parallel path is taken by Mireille de Remi, a young novice discovers that her abbey is the hiding place of a chess set, and who struggles to survive in the heart of the French Revolution. The stories of these two women, two hundred years apart, slowly converge in the book. A number of important historical figures – Rousseau, Voltaire, Talleyrand, Napoleon, and others play smaller roles in the book as well.

The book tells a large tale and has a big, convoluted plot. I found it a nice interesting read. Good fun, really, and to some extent a cult book. Still well worth a visit, in my opinion.

See, also by Katherine Neville, from amazon US: Calculated Risk, The Magic Circle, and her most recent book, The Fire: A Novel.

Or, if you prefer amazon UK, use this link:Katherine Nevilles books. And here is a link to the German translation of The Eight: Das Montglane-Spiel at Amazon DE.

Tags: , ,