Recent Reads - The Eight

The Eight by Katherine Neville - This exciting adventure story has been one of my favorites for many years, and it's one I re-read fairly regularly. It's sort of a combination of thriller, mystery, and historical novel, with some sci-fi and fantasy elements thrown in for good measure. There are parallel stories taking place in two different time periods. In one, a French nun named Mireille has fled an Abbey during the French Revolution, and she carries with her pieces of an ancient chess set said to have mystical power. Some of the other nuns have carried away pieces of the chess set as well, and the mission the Abbess has charged them with is to protect those pieces and scatter them so that the mysterious formula hidden in the chess set cannot fall into the wrong hands. Mireille eventually winds up with many of chess pieces, and on her own personal quest to recover as many of them as possible and figure out the secret hidden in the set. She travels all over Europe and to Algeria in her search, and faces intrigue, conspiracies, and deadly situations. In the second story, Catherine is a computer specialist in the 1970s who has been assigned to develop programs and models in Algeria for the fledgling organization OPEC. Before leaving the USA, she is recruited to hunt for an antique chess piece while in Algeria. She becomes a player in the same dangerous Game as Mireille, and embroiled in her own race to find the chess pieces and decipher the formula before the "bad guys" do. But who is on the Black Team and who is on the White Team? Who can either of these women trust as allies?

As many times as I've read this book, I thoroughly enjoy it every time, and I especially love the character Catherine's dry humor.

My previous posts about The Eight can be seen HERE and HERE.

By the same author: The Fire

(Book #39 in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge)

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