Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have been a stellar writing team for more than two decades, creating thrillers based in science, history, and a touch of psychological profiling. One novel was turned into a bad movie, but there is one additional reason to prefer the book: FBI Special Agent Pendergast.
Over the course of more than 20 books, from his first appearance in Relic, Pendergast has been a brilliant, mysterious figure. He is a slender-built man with silvery eyes, wearing a black suit in almost all climates, including Miami. And he is as inscrutable as Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto — especially to his superiors and would-be partners. Born into a wealthy New Orleans family, he is not adverse to using his wealth to aid his investigations, to pay for anything that would be outside the FBI’s budget. These include higher-class accommodations; hiring outside contractors; travel arrangements that may seem trivial, but essential; to outright blackmail of anyone stupid enough to hinder him.
Pendergast’s opponents have been varied and unusual: from a creature based on exotic pharmaceutical plants to a serial killer who deposits the hearts of his victims on the graves of suicides — or are they? His partners and personal support are as diverse as he can be monochromatic: NYPD Lt. Vincent D’Agosta, who also made his first appearance in Relic; Constance Greene, a woman whose youthful looks conceal an old soul; Corrie Swanson, whose first appearance in Still Life With Crows would lead to her own novels; and Agent Coldmoon, a partner Pendergast is forced to take to continue with the FBI, who has his own history on the Lakota reservation of South Dakota.
More often than not through the series, until Coldmoon’s first appearance in Verses for the Dead, Pendergast was a rare lone-wolf agent (largely without a partner from the Bureau), and his perpetrators tend to die before they can stand trial. Instant justice served on the villain maybe gratifying to the reader, but it also becomes problematic for Pendergast, giving him acclaim and a reputation.
Just as interesting, and disturbing, is Pendergast’s own family tree. The reader discovers that he comes by his eccentricities naturally, while his brother Diogenes — well, you really must read the series to understand how two brothers can be such opposites, especially when it comes to law and chaos or the state of Constance’s soul.
The latest Pendergast novel, Bloodless, is now available from Hatchette Books.
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