"The Eight" and "The Fire" Now Audiobooks

A review of Katherine Neville's "The Eight" and "The Fire" audiobooks: From Boston.com On Audio

Neverlands made real February 8, 2009 We all have a stack of audiobooks (and books) collected over the years that taunt us from the shelves, knowing we don't have time for them. Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the new audiobooks vying for attention, I decided to adhere to at least one New Year's resolution and clear my shelves of some titles. Thankfully, "The Eight" was worth the wait. Originally published in 1988, 25 years before "The Da Vinci Code," it has the same conspiratorial vibe. A chess set made for Charlemagne is at the heart of two stories, centuries apart but intertwined. Chess becomes an allegory for the dangerous game played among characters as one young woman hunts for the missing chess pieces in 1972, while in 1790 a nun finds herself crossing paths with Napoleon and the conspirators of the French Revolution as she tries to hide and protect those same pieces. They had been buried for hundreds of years in a French abbey and, if united with the board, supply a magic formula that could help a player attain world domination, thanks to everything from alchemy and numerology to the supposed mystical powers of the Freemasons. Even if that sounds like a lot of hokum, Katherine Neville pulls it off, blithely rewriting history and making it sound realistic. The audiobook is read with great elan by Susan Denaker, who manages a cast of men and women of varied nationalities and centuries. The sequel, sadly, is less enjoyable. It took Neville 20 years to come out with "The Fire," also read with great enthusiasm and talent by Denaker. However, the story is overwritten, overthought, and consequently not as interesting. The daughter of the protagonist in "The Eight" is now chasing the same chess pieces, but Neville spends less time on each character, cramming in more detail but not allowing us to get to know any one character until about halfway through. 'The Fire" is so bloated that you may actually be better off with the abridgement. ____________________________________________________________________ Confession: I have yet to finish "The Fire." I'm presently on page 334 and the story seems to have run out of steam for me. Months have passed since I so eagerly started the book and power-read my way through the first 300 pages or so. I will finish it, though. I want to know what happens - I have projected an ending, I'll see if I'm correct :)