Review by Booklist Review
The authors of such hits as Relic (1992) and The Cabinet of Curiosities [BKL Je 1 & 15 02] bring back Special Agent Pendergast, the FBI man whose slightly archaic dialogue, unique mode of dress, and seemingly endless array of esoteric facts make him a fascinating lead character. This time out Pendergast is in Medicine Creek, Kansas, a small town that appears to be home to its very own serial killer. The novel begins with a gruesome murder, after which we're introduced to wily Sheriff Dent Hazen, a man who doesn't take kindly to out-of-towners investigating crimes on his turf. Just as we're getting to know Hazen, the pace kicks into high gear, with more bodies and a full-tilt investigation. As usual, Preston and Child deftly mix the real and the surreal, creating an atmosphere in which everything, for reasons we can't quite nail down, seems a tad off-kilter. Call it creeping paranoia, perhaps, or the dreadful certainty that something awful is about to happen. Whatever you call it, it's a recipe for success. --David Pitt
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This latest Preston and Child thriller, even in abbreviated form, offers gore galore, mutilations, bizarre ritual murders, an obstreperous sheriff, a young woman in jeopardy, a town consumed by terror and a spooky local legend-in short, an abundance of traditional suspense novel ingredients. Compensating for this apparent lack of imagination is the thriller's remarkable hero, Special Agent Pendergast, who's on leave from the FBI. This somewhat ethereal, cerebral specialist in macabre murders is a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Mulder of The X-Files, but with his courtly Southern manner and combat expertise, he's very much his own man. Narrator Auberjonois, a familiar stage and screen presence, uses an appropriately silky accent and a playfully sarcastic tone for Pendergast. Auberjonois is equally successful with the other characters, especially the hard-headed but good-hearted Sheriff Dent Hazen, who emerges as a Wilfred Brimley minus the bluster; 18-year-old town rebel Corrie Swanson; and the killer, whose method of communication would challenge any vocal interpreter. Equally important, Auberjonois narrates the tale with the sort of mesmerizing intensity that can, and does, turn a fairly familiar yarn into a scary campfire chillfest. Simultaneous release with the Warner hardcover (Forecasts, June 2). (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
FBI agent Pendergast investigates a series of bizarre murders in Medicine Creek, KS. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Holmesian FBI Special Agent Pendergast returns, silver-eyed and cadaverous as ever, to take on a bizarre serial murder case in the cornfields of Kansas. Pendergast's genius could easily be more gripping than his vehicles, but so far--as with 1995's Relic--such has not been the case. Showing that two minds research more richly than one, Preston and Childs bring literary flair to opening pages that suggest we're walking into a virtual-reality painting of Kansas cornfields at sunset with turkey vultures circling above something dead. A cow perhaps? So thinks Sheriff Dent Hazen as he plows through endless, towering rows of bio-enhanced corn. But he finds instead a partly scalped female body in ripped clothes set into a 30-foot circle where the corn has been cropped, her splayed form encircled by dead crows jammed onto upright Indian arrows. So artistic! State troopers arrive to help Hazen, but GPS shows that the corpse falls within Hazen's jurisdiction at Medicine Creek, a town well on the way down, its farmhouses mainly abandoned (thanks to bioengineering) and even the workforce at the slaughterhouse cut to pieces. Out of the dawn arrives the spectral Pendergast, off-duty but attracted by the serial murderer. But there's only one body, says the sheriff. Pendergast smiles, sort of. And indeed, soon a bloated dead dog, its tail ripped off, appears, to be followed by another body, scalped entirely: a slaughterhouse worker boiled, buttered, and sugared, the skin flopping off his corpse. Where could the killer have found a cauldron big enough to boil a corpse? And why? Pendergast hires a purple-haired teenager with a tongue ring to be his assistant--and for the authors to put in peril when the monster at last shows up, all hairy and barefoot, in totally unexplored Kraus Kaverns, tunnels second in size only to the famed Carlsbad cave system, for a very long climax in varied avenues of darkness and bottomless pits. Yummy beach reading. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
