ENTERTAINMENT

It's rare I can say that I've been waiting 20 years for a book to appear, but that's just the case with Katherine Neville's The Fire, a sequel to 1988's thrillingly original The Eight.

Alas, The Fire doesn't even begin to compare with The Eight, which has deservedly sold more than 1.5 million copies in the United States. I've read The Eight three times, and it never fails to offer new surprises.

It told the dazzling tale of an enchanted, bejeweled chess set, once owned by Charlemagne, that bestowed unstoppable power on whomever possessed it. The book featured two women protagonists, one an 18th-century French nun, the other a 1970s computer whiz. Both risk life and limb traversing the globe, two centuries apart, one bent on splitting up the pieces of the Montglane Service, as it's called, the other on a quest to reunite them.

If this all sounds vaguely Da Vinci Code-esque, it certainly is – only a decade before Dan Brown came along and written with vastly more literary flair and attention to historical accuracy.

The Fire, though, has very little of the glow its name would suggest. Compared to its predecessor, it's a barely flickering ember in the shadow of a radiant bonfire.

Ms. Neville picks up the tale in 2003, this time starring Alexandra Solarin, the daughter of one of the first book's heroines. Xie, as she's called, is a chess prodigy whose rise to fame stops at 11, when she witnesses her father's murder.

As before, there's a back-in-time component set in the 1820s, with another brave heroine. The purpose of the back story never becomes quite clear, and I sped past those passages to get back to the more interesting modern tale.

In truth, as much as I wanted to adore The Fire, not a whole lot of it made sense, and I kept wishing for those blood-tingling morsels of terror and intellectual gamesmanship that made The Eight such a treat.The Fire

Katherine Neville

(Ballantine, $26)