Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Katherine Neville

Katherine Neville's award-winning first novel, The Eight, is widely regarded as a cult classic, translated into thirty languages. That story begins at the dawn of the French Revolution when a fabulous, bejeweled chess set, once owned by Charlemagne but buried for a thousand years, is dug up by the nuns of a French abbey and scattered around the world to preserve its mysterious powers. The nonstop suspense moves from the 1790s of the French Revolution to the 1970s of the OPEC oil embargo. The plot itself is a giant chess game, and the characters are pieces and pawns.

When Neville began her long-anticipated sequel, she was glad that she could retrieve many fascinating historic figures, characters like Benjamin Franklin who, due to earlier schedule constraints, she'd had to limit to walk-on parts. But even despite the recent flurry of additional histories, biographies and films heralding Franklin's three hundredth birthday, Neville's research offered her a big surprise that, inexplicably, none of the experts appeared to have noticed. When it came to her character's well-documented, almost obsessive, penchant for creating or joining private clubs, here was an enigmatic gap in his life.

The Tuesday Club fills that void.