Angel of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 13, 2024

Each new Pendergast novel is sillier than the last, but I keep reading them. The series was more enjoyable when Aloysius Pendergast was an obnoxious, self-satisfied crime solver. I didn’t care much for Pendergast but I appreciated his acumen as a detective. Even after the appearance of Constance Greene — a woman who stopped aging in the nineteenth century and who might be even more annoying than Pendergast — I enjoyed the novels to the extent that they focused on a recognizable reality — i.e., a world without magic, supernatural apparitions, time travel, or similar silliness.

Silliness has now overtaken the series. I had hoped that her unrequited yearning for Pendergast would cause Constance to flee from his life, but Pendergast’s forbidden yearning for Constance keeps bringing them together. Constance’s latest effort to flee took her to the nineteenth century in a dimension nearly identical to the one that Pendergast inhabits (the one that seems to host the supernatural). The latest stories have replaced magic with time travel, which might be the same thing. So now Pendergast is chasing Constance through time. Really, can’t Pendergast go back to solving crimes in the present and do away with all these quasi-science fiction themes?

Pendergast has an evil brother named Diogenes and a law enforcement friend named Vincent D’Agosta. Both are trapped in the past with Pendergast, who chose not to heed Constance’s plea that he remain in his own century after she returned to the nineteenth — albeit in another dimension — to save her sister Mary from the evil Enoch Leng, another member of the Pendergast family. She might even save her alter-self (or Binky, as the childhood version of Constance is known in this dimension and perhaps in infinite others).

Leng is a doctor whose experiments in life extension resulted in the deaths of dozens of test subjects. In Constance’s timeline, Leng killed Mary by dissecting her while she was still alive. Constance’s plan is to save this version of Mary (and this version of her brother Joe, not to mention Binky) while obtaining vengeance. The story essentially continues the plot that began in The Cabinet of Dr. Leng.

Angel of Vengeance is more an action/adventure story than a crime mystery. I suspect that’s what many series fans want. I suspect those fans will be satisfied with the story. Its 19th century atmosphere echoes Dickens. Pendergast wears various disguises, characters are captured and rescued, fights break out from time to time (occasionally with knives because nineteenth century), buildings explode, people are poisoned, and so forth. The story is fun and moderately exciting but not surprising. Readers who enjoy the series will know what to expect. New readers might want to start with an earlier novel because Angel of Vengeance won’t be easy to digest for those who aren’t familiar with the backstory.

The novel’s ending might leave the door open for another time travel story. Why can’t the brilliant detective go back to solving bizarre crimes instead of hopping around the multiverse? Maybe he will. For now, I can confidently recommend Angel of Vengeance to Pendergast fans, although less enthusiastically than I would recommend books that are more tightly attached to the same part of the multiverse that I inhabit.

RECOMMENDED

Extinction by Douglas Preston

Published by Forge Books on April 23, 2024

The Jurassic Park franchise suggests that the public has an insatiable appetite for stories centered around the revival of extinct species. Extinction imagines a Colorado park called Erebus that differs from Jurassic Park — as the reader is frequently reminded — because the mammoths and other de-extincted species have been genetically modified to eliminate aggressive tendencies. Yeah, what could go wrong?

Rather than giving the reader a Jurassic Park rip-off, Douglas Preston takes the story in a different direction. A newlywed couple is camping in the park at a discrete distance from their wilderness guide. The guide investigates a noise and discovers a large pool of blood where the couple had been camping. The volume of blood and the short time that elapsed before the bodies disappeared suggests that the bodies were decapitated.

Frankie Cash is a senior detective with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. She’s charged with leading the CSI team to investigate the disappearance and presumed murder of the honeymooning couple. The newlywed husband’s father is a rich old guy who harasses Cash about finding his son (or his son’s killer) while engaging in boneheaded acts that only obstruct her progress.

Cash conducts a murder investigation that overlaps a wilderness adventure. She suspects that the killers are members of a cannibalistic cult, while Erebus wants to blame the crime on environmentalists. That the killers are armed with spears and knives does suggest a cult, perhaps one that is headed by the QAnon Shaman.

The head of security at Erebus seems to be misdirecting Cash, steering her away from an abandoned mine that might be at the heart of the mystery. What is he trying to hide? The answer is farfetched (as is the way of the modern thriller) but nevertheless entertaining.

Cash is in conflict with a boss who wants all the glory if she succeeds and none of the blame if she fails to catch the bad guys. This is a standard storyline, but it at least invites the reader to warm up to Cash, who is otherwise a bit bland. The story’s action scenes are suitable to a thriller.

Preston is a seasoned author (he takes the opportunity to have a character praise the Preston & Childs novel he’s reading) who can probably construct a novel like this one while he’s clipping his toenails. Extinction isn’t special but it isn’t a waste of the reader’s time. Frankie Cash is not a memorable protagonist and the story didn’t excite me, but the plot moves quickly and the key revelation (what is Erebus trying to hide from the public?) is genuinely surprising, although the surprise is largely dictated by its implausibility.

RECOMMENDED

Bloodless by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 17, 2021

Bloodless gets off to a promising start by reimagining the D.B. Cooper airplane hijacking. Decades later (roughly in our present), a bloodless body is found in Savannah. Is a vampire roaming the streets of Savannah? It seems more likely to be the work of a particularly gruesome murderer, although sucking all the blood from a body is not an easy task. Aloysius Pendergast and his current partner, Armstrong Coldmoon, are diverted to Savannah to investigate. Pendergast’s ward, the mysterious Constance Greene, goes along for the ride. More bloodless corpses soon appear on the southern landscape, sometimes in a genuinely chilling scene.

Bloodless develops an interesting cast of characters, the kind of people who make satisfying suspects in a murder mystery, including an evil senator who is running for reelection, a documentarian who is filming a series about supernatural events, a scam artist who purports to capture digital images of spirits and demons, and an elderly lady with a collection of antique weapons who lives as a hermit in a hotel’s upper floors. Bloodless also delivers the spooky atmosphere that is almost a necessity in a story set in Savannah.

Some Pendergast novels have flirted with supernatural themes. I haven’t been taken with those stories. I prefer the stories that portray Pendergast as a modern version of Sherlock Holmes, complete with eccentricities that complement his deductive skills. For much of the novel, Bloodless seems like it could go in either direction — a supernatural force might be afoot, perhaps a vampire, or a murderer might be using superstition to mask his killings.

Unfortunately, Preston and Child take the story in a third direction, one that is more science fiction than horror. I don’t want to spoil it, but I will say [stop reading here if you don’t want to risk knowledge of a surprising plot point] that it involves a monster from another dimension. Now, the multiverse is a popular theme in science fiction novels, one that sf writers explore in interesting ways. As they have demonstrated in other novels, Preston and Child are not adept at science fiction. Their explanation for the sudden appearance of blood sucking monster in Savannah is just silly. (Hint: it involves turning a dial too far on a machine that makes no sense.)

The story crashes at the end. I was left wondering why it would be easier for one guy with a handgun to kill a monster in its own universe when it resists death in our universe after being shot with a bazooka, a Tommy gun (yes, seriously), and any number of bullets fired by Glock-wielding cops.

I was also left wondering about all the plot points that were set up in the novel’s first half. It seems like Preston and Child began to write one novel, couldn’t figure out how to end it, and decided to abandon it while writing an ending to a different novel.

I enjoyed the D.B. Cooper angle. I enjoyed the detailed setup. I admired the atmosphere and the careful construction of secondary characters. The authors add a touching scene at the end that’s almost redemptive. If the novel’s strengths hadn’t been counterbalanced by a preposterous conclusion, I would have been a happy reader. At best, I can recommend the first two-thirds of the novel and a brief chapter at the end. You might want to quit after the first two-thirds and make up your own ending if you want to get the most out of Bloodless.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Old Bones by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 20, 2019

Dr. Nora Kelly is an archeologist who has appeared in the authors’ Pendergast novels. Clive Benton has studied the history of the Donner Party, whose ill-fated trip to the Sierra Nevada included cannibalism. After acquiring Tamzene Donner’s lost journal, Benton wants Nora to lead an expedition to find the Lost Camp, the only camp of stranded Donner Party members that was never found. Benton also hopes to find a large quantity of gold coins.

Corrine Swanson is a new FBI agent, although she is also in the Pendergast stable of characters. She’s assigned to investigate a murder at a Civil War graveyard on federal property. The victim was hired to dig up a grave and was killed by his employers after they stole half of the body he uncovered. Further investigation reveals that graves of other individuals of common ancestry have been disinterred, that a woman in that same genealogical line has gone missing, and that another person in that line, Albert Parkin, was part of the Donner Party.

Old Bones tells a familiar story of an archeological dig, conducted by Nora and a couple of archeology students, with Benton acting as an advisor. A few additional characters guide the archeologists into the mountains and help them set up camp. Eventually, someone disturbs the bones they find, some bones are stolen, someone dies, and Swanson rides in on horseback to investigate.

Also familiar is Swanson’s status as a plucky rookie who pieces together information about grave robbers and is certain she’s on the trail of a serious crime, while her jaded boss wants her to end the investigation and devote her time to provable crimes. The story takes a supernatural twist when a character claims to have seen a ghost, presumably the ghost of a child who was unhappy she didn’t receive a proper burial after her leg was eaten. The ghost (or at least a floating green light) helps out the characters on a couple of occasions. I guess readers who like ghosts will appreciate the spectral addition, but it seemed out of place to me.

The plot generates little suspense. The wrongdoer’s identity is fairly obvious. Preston and Child make a halfhearted attempt to mislead the reader as to the wrongdoer’s motivation, but the reader would have to ignore half the plot to fall for it. Old Bones does manage a couple of surprises near the end, although the eventual explanation for the disinterred bodies is too farfetched to take seriously.

I’ve enjoyed most of Preston & Child’s Pendergast novels (Pendergast makes a cameo in the epilog, and his brief appearance is the best part of the story). I’ve been less satisfied by their other offerings, most of which are weaker than the Pendergast series. They have a tendency in those novels to fuel formulaic stories with stock characters and stale ideas. Characters are made sympathetic in predictable ways (Carrie’s unfortunate childhood makes her reach out to another kid with an unfortunate childhood, an unimaginative way of encouraging the reader to feel good about her) but they suffer from a lack of multiple dimensions.

Still, character development isn’t terribly important in a thriller if the plot excites. This one doesn’t. Preston & Child wield the thriller formula with skill, so their novels are always easy to read. Dedicated Preston & Child fans might enjoy Old Bones, but there are better choices on the thriller market.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Pharaoh Key by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on June 12, 2018

Gideon Crew, for reasons explained in earlier books in this series, has only two months to live. Gideon and his co-workers are fired from their operative-adventurer gigs for reasons that also relate to earlier books. Gideon is cleaning out his desk with co-worker Garza when a computer pings with the solution to a decoding problem it’s been working on for five years. After futzing around to figure out what the solution means, Gideon and Garza head to the Hala’ib Triangle in Egypt, one of the world’s most desolate spots, where the secret of the Phaistos Disk is hidden.

To get to the world’s most desolate spot, Gideon and Garza share camels with a British woman who may or may not be the geologist/anthropologist that she claims to be. The story then lurches from one adventure to another, as our dynamic duo plus one deal with water shortages, sandstorms, captivity, trials by fire, fistfights, knife fights, gun fights, tigers, fights with tigers, and other ordeals (including a tribal custom that involving wedding a teen virgin, which might not be an ordeal but isn’t on Garza’s bucket list).

There is a certain familiarity/predictability to the storyline. Preston and Child mention H. Rider Haggard, perhaps as a hat-tip for Haggard’s pioneering work in the Lost World genre, from which The Pharaoh Key heavily borrows. The novel is also like an Indiana Jones movie without the special effects: life-threatening situation, followed by narrow escape, followed by another life-threatening situation, followed by another narrow escape, and so on. The life-threatening situations give Gideon multiple opportunities to fret that he expected to die soon but not in quite the way he anticipates dying before the next narrow escape comes along, sparing him until a new threat causes him to fret about the way he is about to die.

The plot is like popcorn; each kernel is tasty but eating to the bottom of the bag isn’t filling or nutritious, in part because Preston and Child fail to bring much imagination to the pattern in which they plow the ground. The ending is not nearly as surprising as the authors intended; it seemed to be to the most likely outcome.

I did, however, like the way Preston and Child used the theoretical link between Pharaoh Akhenaten (one of the first adherents of a monotheistic religion) and Moses, who may have been inspired by Akhenaten to champion Israelite monotheism. And while the adventure story is ordinary, it does have entertaining moments. I can’t recommend The Pharaoh Key with enthusiasm, but Preston and Child fans will want to read it just to find out what happens next in the adventurous life of Gideon Crew.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS