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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Silver Falls Library | SF PRESTON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Amity Public Library | FIC PRESTON Pendergast # 2 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lyons Public Library | M PRESTON | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Preston, D. | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Mount Angel Public Library | PRESTON, D. Pendergast #02 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Sheridan Public Library | Preston Pendergast v.2 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | PRESTON & CHILD | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Author Notes
Douglas Jerome Preston was born on May 20, 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. in English literature from Pomona College in 1978. His career began at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked as an editor and writer from 1978 to 1985. He also was a lecturer in English at Princeton University.
He became a full-time writer of both fiction and nonfiction books in 1986. Many of his fiction works are co-written with Lincoln Child including Relic, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Wheel of Darkness, Cemetery Dance, and Gideon's Corpse. His nonfiction works include Dinosaurs in the Attic; Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado; Talking to the Ground; and The Royal Road. He has written for numerous magazines including The New Yorker; Natural History; Harper's; Smithsonian; National Geographic; and Travel and Leisure. He became a New York Times Best Selling author with his titles Two Graves and Crimson Shores which he co-wrote with Lincoln Child, and his titles White Fire, The Lost Island Blue Labyrinth and The Lost City of the Monkey God.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
The curator of the Natural History Museum rejoins police and the FBI as they attempt to solve horrific murders. A frightening sequel to The Relic, it's a terrific read on its own. (Sept.) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The netherworld of New York Cityits subways, aqueducts, sewers and the homeless who inhabit themproves as shuddery a setting for the authors' latest scientific monster mash as the American Museum of Natural History did for their bestselling Relic, to which this is the sequel. In the earlier novel, Mbwun, a ferocious creature that seemed part reptile, part human, rampaged through the museum killing people. The sequel, set 18 months after Mbwun was destroyed, opens with a police diver finding the headless bodies of two people apparently killed by underground cannibals. The corpses are sent to the museum's lab for analysis, which brings a number of returnees from Relicburly homicide cop Vincent D'Agosta, anthropologist Margo Green, New York Post crime reporter Bill Smithbackto the case. They're soon joined by the novels' Sherlock Holmes figure, the irresistibly cool Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI. Forays by these principals into the kingdom of the Mole People (underground homeless), plus some forensic breakthroughs, point to a race of mini-Mbwun at work in an escalating series of savage killings that incite the city's upper crust to civil disobedience. The city's answer, to flood its nether vaults, turns out to threaten a global catastrophe that only Pendergast and company, aided by Navy SEALS, can avert. The story's "surprise" ending makes as much sense as ketchup on popcorn, and the entire novel has a desperate air about it as the authors stuff it with complications and, by pitting the homeless against the swells, try to create a kind of Decapitation of the Vanities. It's high on suspense and tremendous fun in parts, though, especially when exploring the city's nightmare underbelly. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The doughty crew that bested Mbwun, a flesh-eating Amazonian creature that stalked its victims through Manhattan's Museum of Natural History, in Relic (1994), faces a new but all too familiar threat. When the skeletal remains of a socially prominent young woman are flushed out of an Upper West Side storm drain, sans skull, NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta seeks assistance from anthropologist Margo Green and her sometime mentor Dr. Frock. With timely help from a mysterious FBI agent known only as Pendergast, the technocrats eventually put paid to the reptilian Museum Beast that, deprived of its dietary staple (a lily indigenous to Brazil's rainforest), had found human brains an acceptable substitute. Suspecting the past and present cases may be linked, D'Agosta becomes convinced when he learns that the decapitation rate among the underground homeless is on the rise. Pendergast reaches out to the subterranean community, discovering it's being depopulated by brutish beings who dwell in the so-called Devil's Attic, a network of railroad tunnels linking Grand Central Terminal with the suburbs. Meantime, Margo learns that a former colleague has genetically engineered an equivalent of the Mbwun lily (for its narcotic and regenerative properties), which can survive in the Northern Hemisphere. While the unfortunate young man's work went awry, another evil genius took on the project, and monster edibles are growing in the Central Park Reservoir. D'Agosta's panicky superiors decide to exterminate the predatory new mole people (who revere a mad scientist as their messiah) by flooding the Devil's Attic. Once the point of no return is passed, however, Margo determines that the toxic lilies could wash out to sea and do irreparable harm to Earth's food chain. With but hours to go until a wall of water from upstate basins sweeps through the netherworld caverns, then, Pendergast and a band of Navy SEALs must battle their way into the pitch-black abyss to keep the flow contained. Ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. . . in rerun. (Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour)
Booklist Review
This should do for the New York subway system what Jaws did for Long Island beaches. Barely has the excitement of the museum killings (related in Preston and Child's recently filmed Relic [1995]) settled down, than Lieutenant D'Agosta of the NYPD is faced with another series of murders. Dr. Margo Green, the odious scribbler Smithback, FBI Agent Pendergast, and others from Relic are gradually drawn to investigate the death of a Manhattan socialite as well as the less newsworthy murders of several "mole people" --the disaffected and alienated who have formed communities in the old subways, sewers, drainage tunnels, and other deep recesses of Manhattan. Some thoroughly repellent, ghoulish types are the murderous culprits, and Preston and Child skillfully play subplots against each other, as the police and their allies attempt to defeat their horrific opponents before catastrophe overwhelms the Apple. Although Reliquary is a sequel, its exposition carries us easily into the new plot and excites interest in seeing what Preston and Child come up with next, after this yarn's all-loose-ends-tied finale. --Dennis Winters
Library Journal Review
No one is too concerned about the mysterious remains of anonymous homeless people until middle- and upper-class victims are found headless. Pendergast (FBI), Green (anthropologist), and D'Agosta (NYPD) from The Relic (Brilliance Corp., 1995) join forces to subdue what turns out to be a violent mutant race living underground. While some may like gruesome stories where people eat roasted rats in dark tunnels and monsters decapitate subway riders, this story did not become interesting until the last few cassettes. At this point, reader Dick Hill's pacing adds urgency and captures the listener's attention during a last-ditch effort to save not just the city but civilization as we know it. A straight reading might be more efficacious than dramatic caricatures of New Yorkers, mad scientists, Southerners, and women. Yet the production is hampered by technical adjustment to the various voices. For instance, the expression of characters' thoughts reverberates like a whisper in a megaphone; police voices emerging from gas masks during tunnel action are muffled and almost inaudible. These unnecessary elements are distracting and add to the impression that one is listening to a spoof of a horror story. Not recommended.Juleigh Muirhead Clark, Williamsburg, Va. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.