Readers who love their thrillers with a touch of the supernatural and macabre, but with enough police procedural detail thrown in to add realism, could hardly do better than Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Pendergast series. The bestselling and highly rated series stars Aloysius Pendergast, a cultured Southern gentleman FBI agent who’s equal parts investigator and scholar, and pits him against foes both worldly and possibly supernatural.
While there are some common plot threads and characters running through the entire series the authors do a good job of recapping necessary information in each book, so you don’t have to read the series in order. Right now, Brimstone, book #5 in the series (see brief description at the bottom of this post), is on sale for just $1.99, so if you’ve yet to sample Pendergast that may be the place to start.
Relic (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $5.99)
Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum’s dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human…
But the museum’s directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.
Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who-or what-is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?
Reliquary (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $8.99)
Hidden deep beneath Manhattan lies a warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries, mostly forgotten by those who walk the streets above. There lies the ultimate secret of the Museum Beat.
When two grotesquely deformed skeletons are found deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid the investigation.
Margo must once again team up with police lieutenant D’Agosta and FBI agent Pendergast, as well as the brilliant Dr. Frock, to try and solve the puzzle.
The trail soon leads deep underground, where they will face the awakening of a slumbering nightmare.
The Cabinet of Curiosities (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $8.99)
In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered.
Inside are thirty-six bodies–all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago.
While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city.
The nightmare has begun.
Again.
Still Life With Crows (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $7.99)
A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground.
Is it a serial killer, a man with the need to destroy?
Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land?
Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America’s heartland.
Brimstone (4/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99)
A body is found in the attic of a fabulous Long Island estate.
There is a claw print scorched into the wall, and the stench of sulfur chokes the air.
When FBI Special Agent Pendergast investigates the gruesome crime, he discovers that thirty years ago four men conjured something unspeakable.
Has the devil come to claim his due?
Some things can’t be undone.
Click here to browse the full Pendergast series.
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