­Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child write the kind of relentlessly fun books that some people feel guilty for reading. They're filled with improbable plots, out of this world characters and concepts that push the limits of plausibility. But they're also firmly grounded in the heart and passion of good storytelling, and that makes all the difference. Cold Vengeance is just what the title suggests: a revenge story, but a revenge story layered with a search and sewn throughout with the seeds of mysterious shadows that will come to light in future books.
It's the kind of thing Preston and Child have gotten ridiculously good at over the course of the last five or six of their novels featuring preternaturally smart FBI Agent Aloysius XLPendergast. Picking up after the events of the last novel, Fever Dream (don't worry, you can still follow it pretty well even if you didn't catch that one), Cold Vengeance follows Pendergast as he attempts to prove that his wife Helen was never killed by a lion, as he always believed, but was murdered. After a near miss on a hunting trip in Scotland that sets him on the trail of a killer, Pendergast begins his journey for revenge, a worldwide chase that takes him from Scotland, to New York and to his ancestral home in Louisiana, and begins to reveal a conspiracy deeper than even he could have ever guessed.
The novel flits between the hunter (Pendergast) and the hunted, with occasional glimpses into the lives of Pendergast's old pals Vincent D'Agosta and Corrie Swanson (a Pendergast collaborator from an earlier Preston and Child effort, Still Life with Crows) as they both attempt to help their determined friend and do a little digging of their own into the situation. Cold Vengeance is a continuation of Preston and Child's efforts to dig deeper into their favourite hero's past, something that was kept hidden for several books, and which the character himself often avoided discussing. It's a successful effort, in part because it offers a refreshing change from the Pendergast who travelled the world solving random crimes, but also because it gives a glimpse into a different side of the character. So many authors are content with letting their thriller heroes languish in the same existence over two dozen novels, holding themselves with same air of indestructibility or in over their head enthusiasm.
Preston and Child are daring enough to roll the dice with a Pendergast consumed by his mission, driven by his desire to not only find vengeance, but to find the truth. His cool exterior begins to crack in this book, and even though it's always fun to see everyone's favourite Southern aristocrat crime solver be a snooty cracker of jokes, it's both refreshing and surprising to see him in a darker mode. Though the character is changing, the old Preston and Child fun is still there. The authors keep everything hurtling forward at a breathless pace, making this yet another of their books to keep you reading late into the night. And by the end, you'll only want more. Preston and Child's books are seen by too many readers as a kind of guilty pleasure, as something they read to escape from more sensible books. But they shouldn't be, because despite over the top concepts and superhuman characters, they're still among the best thrillers you can find.
About the authors
Lincoln Child
Lincoln Child was born in Westport, Connecticut. From as early as Second Grade, he wrote a short story entitled Bumble the Elephant (now believed by scholars to be lost). Along with two dozen short stories composed during his youth, he wrote a science-fiction novel in Tenth Grade called Second Son of Daedalus and a shamelessly Tolkeinesque fantasy in Twelfth Grade titled The Darkness to the North (left unfinished at 400 manuscript pages). Lincoln graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, majoring in English. He made his way to New York in the summer of 1979, intent on finding a job in publishing. While in New York, Lincoln assembled several collections of ghost and horror stories, beginning with the hardcover collections Dark Company (1984) and Dark Banquet (1985).
Douglas Preston
Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in the suburb of Wellesley. Notable events in his early life included the loss of a fingertip at the age of three to a bicycle; the loss of his two front teeth to his brother Richard's fist; and various broken bones, also incurred in dust-ups with Richard. As they grew up, Doug, Richard, and their little brother David roamed the quiet suburbs of Wellesley, terrorising the natives with home-made rockets and incendiary devices. Preston attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy before settling down to English literature. After graduating, Preston began his career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as an editor, writer, and eventually manager of publications.
His eight-year stint at the Museum resulted in the non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. Preston achieved a small success with the publication of Cities of Gold, a non-fiction book about Coronado's search for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. Since then he has published several more non-fiction books on the history of the American Southwest, Talking to the Ground and The Royal Road, as well as a novel entitled Jennie. In the early 1990s Preston and Child teamed up to write suspense novels.