Dance of Death by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (book two of the Diogenes Pendergast trilogy)

Professor Hamilton's class sits paralyzed with horror as he stops in the middle of his lecture on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land to begin clawing at his face, drawing blood, and screaming, "Get them off me." Elsewhere, Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta is making dinner for Captain Laura Hayward when he is summoned by Constance Greene to her home. Her guardian, Special Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast, has not been heard from since the events of Brimstone six weeks prior.

Assuming Pendergast dead, Constance gives D'Agosta a note Pendergast left for him. It passes on the responsibility of stopping his brother Diogenes from committing the "perfect crime" by January 28, a week away. D'Agosta's first task is to visit Pendergast's great aunt Cornelia (definitely one of the more interesting supporting characters in the series) to get info on Diogenes and the family, including a few intimate tidbits about Pendergast himself (reminding us that he is the "normal" one in his family only by comparison).

Information comes from a most unexpected source that Diogenes plans to kill everyone who was close to Aloysius — and that could easily include D'Agosta himself. But D'Agosta discovers that Diogenes has something even worse in mind, when he goes to a meeting with Hayward.

Meanwhile, newlyweds Nora Kelly and Bill Smithback (just back from the honeymoon that took place during Brimstone) are returning to work conflicts. Smithback's beat is being slowly abdicated by his fellow New York Times reporter, up and comer Bryce Harriman. And at the New York Museum of History, Nora's opinion (on whether to return a religious artifact to the tribe that sold it to the museum 130 years ago) differs from that of another returning employee, Margo Green, new editor of the museum's newsletter, Museology. Neither has any idea what's really in store for them.

In Brimstone, authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child briefly introduced readers to Agent Pendergast's brother Diogenes, who features largely in Dance of Death. We are not surprised to learn that Diogenes is criminally insane (since we learned in The Cabinet of Curiosities that insanity runs rampant throughout the Pendergast lineage, sometimes beneficially but usually not). So, if Pendergast is Sherlock Holmes, then Diogenes is both Mycroft and Moriarty. (Even his name is a reference to the gentlemen's club Mycroft frequents in the Conan Doyle stories.)

Making the crime personal this time around gives Dance of Death a greater emotional resonance and gets the reader more deeply involved. This makes the book more fully entertaining than the events in its predecessor (not least due to the absence of the labyrinthine plot that made Brimstone hard to follow). I would even say that readers interested mostly in the character of Diogenes could feel free to skip Brimstone and move right on to Dance of Death, since all the information needed to proceed is reintroduced.

Dance of Death does not suffer from the usual problems of the middle book of a trilogy. It stands alone, and in fact it improves on its predecessor by focusing on character over plot. We learn about Diogenes as an individual and not just his machinations (as the authors did with Count Fosco in Brimstone). And those who get caught up in the story will be glad to know that it concludes masterfully in the third book, The Book of the Dead.

After the end of the story, the Dance of Death audiobook also includes a short interview given by Preston and Child with Agent Pendergast (given prior to the events of the book, they are careful to say). In it, the subject (voiced by audiobook reader Rene Auberjonois) proves to be very Holmesian indeed in his responses to the authors' "vapid queries," including a comment accusing the authors of having "sensationalized" his cases.

The Cabinet of Curiosities by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (audio book read by Rene Auberjonois)

During work at a Catherine Street construction site in lower Manhattan, a charnel of bones is discovered: 36 bodies, all told, buried around 100 years before. FBI Special Agent Pendergast takes one skull to archeologist Nora Kelly, who places that victim's age at 13. When Pendergast gets Kelly access to the site, she learns that the victims were nearly all teens, primarily boys, and that they all appear to have had similar injuries to the lumbar spine.

While Nora gets in trouble for her work with Pendergast, her on-and-off boyfriend, reporter William Smithback, Jr., of The New York Times is working so hard to get a scoop that he's ruining his relationship with Nora. Later, Smithback gets himself into hot water when he discovers an address before Pendergast and Nora do and goes to check out the location.

The discovery of a sheaf of letters leads to the identity of the perpetrator of the century-old murders — a scientist searching for the secret of longer life — but that turns out to be only the beginning of the mystery when the body of a 27-year-old woman is found with the same portion of the spinal cord (the cauda equina, or horse's tail) removed. This grotesque surgery was likely done while the woman was alive, and was thus the cause of death.

Is a copycat killer at large, or did the scientist actually find what he was looking for and has chosen to recommence his spree? Or is something even more sinister and mysterious going on? Pendergast is sure that "The solution to the new murders lies in the old." One thing is for sure: with authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, it will be something other than the mundane and will be somehow connected to "the Cabinet of Curiosities."

In this first Preston/Child collaboration to feature Pendergast as the protagonist, we learn that a streak of insanity runs in his family when he asks advice of his great-aunt Cordelia about other family members. An odd duck anyway, Pendergast see an attack on him as a "positive development" since it means he's getting close to a solution.

The Cabinet of Curiosities is altogether a fascinating read, commingling old and new science with the tropes of horror fiction. Preston and Child don't shy away from the horror of having a deranged surgeon perform his signature surgery without anesthesia (and fully awake) on a major character.

One particular highlight was highly unexpected. From his hospital bed (following the aforementioned "positive development") — in a supernatural twist on The Daughter of Time — Pendergast travels through time and puts himself back into late-19th-century New York (on a fact-finding expedition) using only his mind.

For a novel so otherwise grounded in reality, however strange and obscure that reality may sometimes be, it takes a definite leap of faith to follow Pendergast along on his flight of fancy. But it is simultaneously a very rewarding trip into the period and takes The Cabinet of Curiosities another notch above the fray.

Other authors would have simply had their characters find old documents or the like. This choice, though unorthodox, is an imaginative improvement, especially since the authors work hard to make it believable. (Though Pendergast is inscrutable enough to make it plausible that he would spend his time developing this skill.)

Actor René Auberjonois — probably best known for his television work on Benson (for which he was Emmy-nominated), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Boston Legal, as well as in the film version of M*A*S*H — shows off his impressive vocal range in the audiobook of The Cabinet of Curiosities. Auberjonois makes each character different while retaining a familiar thread throughout (though he doesn't quite achieve the "mellifluous" tone frequently attributed to Pendergast).

The Cabinet of Curiosities has a wonderful sense of atmosphere that will particularly delight fans of the novels of Robert Bloch. (Enoch Leng is an especially Blochian character.) The authors' highly descriptive style immerses the reader in a richly drawn, though unfamiliar, world. And their intelligent approach appeals to more literate readers while their plot operates solidly within the confines of the genre.

Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (unabridged audio book read by Rene Auberjonois)

Respected New York Times journalist William Smithback Jr., best known for his exposés, has been murdered. His wife Nora Kelly, archeologist with the Museum of Natural History, was brutally attacked as the killer left. But this is an open and shut case. The perpetrator, the couple's neighbor Colin Fearing, was identified by five witnesses and was captured clearly on security cameras. There's only one problem: Colin Fearing's death certificate was signed ten days ago.

When voodoo artifacts are found at the scene, the press cries "Zombie!" And when DNA testing confirms that the killer was indeed Fearing, things start to get really strange. Is there really some form of zombi voodoo involved, or is the solution as simple as a local multimillionaire paying for a hit on Smithback, the reporter who smeared his name? And what does a well-hidden Manhattan commune (connected by Smithback in the press to animal sacrifices) have to do with it all?

Both angles are thoroughly investigated by FBI Special Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast and New York police lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta (the heroes of several of authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's previous novels), with the added incentive that Smithback was a friend of theirs and accompanied them on previous cases. But you can be sure that the authors will not let us off with an easy answer.

Cemetery Dance is my first of the Preston/Child collaborations. I had previously enjoyed Preston's solo novel The Codex (one of the best books I read in 2008), and it's great to learn that he and Child work together equally well. Readers interested in voodoo and other similar practices will find a lot of good information here, as Pendergast's mentor arrives and acts as a veritable encyclopedia on the various forms, specifically obeah.

But Cemetery Dance is not all talk. There is plenty of action, and no character is ever truly safe. One particular highlight is a chase through a large museum storage room housing dozens of plastic-covered whale skeletons. And Preston and Child manage to leaven the intensity inherent in a murder being investigated by the friends of the deceased by including some slower scenes delving into D'Agosta's other personal struggles, particularly his relationship with fellow cop Laura Hayward. In the process, this makes him much more fully developed than the sometimes chimerical Pendergast. (A Sherlock Holmes type, Pendergast is prone to unconventional methods of investigation, often leaving D'Agosta to clean up the mess, and D'Agosta is getting a little tired of this role.)

The authors' highly descriptive style immerses the reader in a richly drawn, though unfamiliar, world. And their intelligent approach appeals to more literate readers while their plot operates solidly within the confines of the thriller genre. This includes, of course, a number of cliches that must be expected, if not necessarily welcomed, such as how, no matter what information is needed, Pendergast magically seems to have access to it. (Perhaps Cemetery Dance will boost sales of the works of Wade Davis, whom Pendergast references by name.)

In addition to D'Agosta and the fascinating Pendergast (though flawed, surely one of fiction's great idiosyncratic investigators), Cemetery Dance is peopled with other terrific characters — people like Bill Smithback, Nora Kelly, and Laura Hayward — who I am eager to encounter again. Luckily, most or all of them are featured in the many previous Preston and Child novels, like The Cabinet of Curiosities (the one I'm most likely to try next).

Actor René Auberjonois — probably best known for his television work on Benson (for which he was Emmy-nominated), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Boston Legal, as well as in the film version of M*A*S*H — shows off his impressive vocal range in the unabridged reading of Cemetery Dance. Auberjonois makes each character different while retaining a familiar thread throughout (though he doesn't quite achieve the "mellifluous" tone frequently attributed to Pendergast).

Delving into their world for the first time, I did not expect something so akin to a horror novel coming from this duo. But I'm not complaining. Preston and Child walk the line of mainstream thriller and zombie horror deftly in Cemetery Dance, and it makes me wonder if perhaps the zombie subgenre is not as over and done with as it would seem, if such a literate and intelligent plot can be gleaned from it. Maybe more authors need to go back to the original roots of the phenomenon.