“The Fire”

Katherine Neville´s debut novel, The Eight, dazzled audiences and paved the way for the era of such epic thrillers as The Da Vinci Code. Now the electrifying tale of the mystical chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne continues.

2003, Colorado: Alexandra Solarin is summoned to her family´s Rocky Mountain hideaway for her mother´s birthday. Thirty years ago, her parents believed they had scattered the pieces of the Montglane chess set around the world, burying with them the secrets of the power that comes with possessing it. But Alexandra arrives to find her mother missing and a series of strategically placed clues as to her whereabouts.

The Game has begun again! Alexandra will be swept into a journey that will carry her across continents.

1822, Albania: Thirty years after the French Revolution, when the chess set was unearthed, Europe hovers on the brink of war. Ali Pasha, the most powerful ruler in the Ottoman Empire, about to be attacked by Turkish forces, sends his 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 Games, 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 a thousand years before: Baghdad.

Blending exquisite prose and captivating history with nonstop suspense, Neville weaves an unforgettable story of peril, action, and intrigue.