nother book in the glut of DaVinci Code rip offs, The Eight is about an ancient chess set, given by the Moors to a French King, the pieces and board of which were inscribed with mystical symbols and formulae holding secrets since lost to time. Modern day characters set about attempting to recover all of the pieces, while simultaneously finding out what they might do, and reading about the adventures of people who sought to collect the pieces hundreds of years earlier.

The biggest difference between this one and the other DaVinci Code imitators is that Neville wrote this in 1990, more than a decade before Dan Brown stepped up to the "historical mystery/scavenger hunt in modern day race against the clock to save the world" plate. It's a good premise, and could have been a good novel, if it had just been written a little better, and undergone some harsh editing.

To the scores:

The Eight, by Katherine Neville (1990)
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/4
Characters: 7
Suspense: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 5

I would never have gotten through this one if I hadn't been on vacation with an hour or two a day to devote to it, and even with plane rides to kill and unfamiliar beds to acclimate myself to, I spent much of the book wishing it would just end so I could see how things turned out. It's the type of book you start reading, look up an hour later, and realize it's only been 10 minutes.

Pacing aside, my other major complaint was with the too-superstar cast. Much of the book is told from the POV of a young nun in Fance in the late 1700s, and during her travels she meets and interacts with pretty much every famous person alive during that era. At first it's sort of cool seeing all the famous historical names being dropped, but it quickly becomes silly, when every single person the nun meets is someone still famous 300 years later. By the time she runs into a guy on a horse in the anarchy of Paris during the revolution and the purge, and it's teen Napoleon, and he just happens to be heading the exact same direction she is and ends up giving her safe passage and even letting her stay in his mother's house on Corsica, I was openly snorting at the convenience of things.

There's a shipwreck later on and the one guy named in the entire village near the shoals where the survivors wash up? Benedict Arnold. It's partially understandable since the chess set is known to the rich and powerful (and the Freemasons -- yes, them again, just like in every other historical novel with a conspiracy theory) and therefore every other character is a nobleman or a queen or someone like that, but when every visit to a bar or chance encounter on a busy highway is William Wordsworth, or William Blake, or Catherine the Great, or Robespierre, and so on, it gets a little ridiculous.

It would definitely have helped if I'd recently read a book on European and World History during the 1790s, since then I would have had more than a faint idea who everyone was and what they were actually doing during that time. A better author would have given some introduction to them all to though, rather than just assuming the reader knew them well already, but if I started a list of improvements this novel could use, that would hardly make the top ten.

It's not a bad novel, but it's long and often boring, and I would not have finished it without downtime while on vacation and in airports/planes. I am unable to explain the four-star rating it's got on Amazon.com; but the few reviews I've glanced at certainly seem more forgiving of the pacing issues, name-dropping, and excessive length than I was.

This was the author's first novel, and her only popular one, so I tend to think this one was a lucky shot that just happened to hit the historical mystery market before people knew there was such a thing, and am not surprised that none of the author's other books have been successful.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.