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.

THE FIRE © Copyright 2011 by Katherine Neville. Reprinted
with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.