Ballantine
October 2008
On Sale: October 14, 2008
Featuring: Alexandra Solarin
464 pages ISBN: 0345500679 EAN: 9780345500670 Hardcover Add to Wish List
Katherine Neville’s groundbreaking novel, The Eight, dazzled
audiences more than twenty years ago and set the literary
stage for the epic thriller. 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. Now the electrifying global adventure continues, in
Neville’s long anticipated sequel: THE FIRE
2003,
Colorado: Alexandra Solarin is summoned home to her family’s
ancestral Rocky Mountain hideaway for her mother’s birthday.
Thirty years ago, her parents, Cat Velis and Alexander
Solarin, believed that they had scattered the pieces of the
Montglane Service around the world, burying with them the
secrets of the power that comes with possessing it. But
Alexandra arrives to find that her mother is missing and
that a series of strategically placed clues, followed
swiftly by the unexpected arrival of a mysterious assortment
of houseguests, indicates that something sinister is
afoot.
When she inadvertently discovers from her
aunt, the chess grandmaster Lily Rad, that the most powerful
piece of Charlemagne’s service has suddenly resurfaced and
the Game has begun again, Alexandra is swept into a journey
that takes her from Colorado to the Russian wilderness and
at last into the heart of her own hometown: Washington
D.C.
1822, Albania: Thirty years after the French
Revolution, when the chess service was unearthed, all of
Europe hovers on the brink of the War of Greek Independence.
Ali Pasha, the most powerful ruler in the Ottoman Empire,
has angered the sultan and is about to be attacked by
Turkish forces. Now he sends the only person he can rely
upon–his young daughter, Haidee–on a dangerous mission to
smuggle a valuable relic out of Albania, through the
mountains and over the sea, to the hands of the one man who
might be able to save it.
Haidee’s journey from
Albania to Morocco to Rome to Greece, and into the very
heart of the Game, will result in revelations about the
powerful chess set and its history that will lead at last to
the spot where the service was first created more than one
thousand years before: Baghdad.
Blending exquisite
prose and captivating history with nonstop suspense, Neville
again weaves an unforgettable story of peril, action, and
intrigue.
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