This book also wraps up the Diogenes trilogy, though not all the threads tie off precisely - there’s plenty to continue carrying through the next books in the series.Īs always, P&C do a great job with atmosphere. We get to see Pendergast at his best and at his worst, navigating his way through obstacles yet unable to face his own personal history. The action clips along throughout the book, and the double-climax carries the last 200 pages of the book along superbly. None of the plotlines ever feel like it’s gotten subsumed by the others (as the subplots in Brimstone did).
DIOGENES PENDERGAST SERIES
I like this book best of the series because it handles all the disparate threads so well. Like many elements of the Pendergast series, it dances right on that edge of implausibility. I don’t want to say too much about the nature of Diogenes’s plan, or how Pendergast figures it out, because there’s so much rich character work that goes on in both of those revelations. When his replacement turns out to be the lovely Lady Viola Maskalene, a woman with a profound connection to Pendergast, more people start to suspect that something is up - but all attempts to stall or cancel the exhibit’s opening fail. A notable British Egyptologist, brought over to help Nora, goes mad and attacks her, forcing a security guard to shoot and kill him. A lighting technician is found disemboweled, apparently by the computer programmer. Everyone shrugs off the old superstitions, until more tragic “accidents” start to occur. Inevitably, rumours of a curse grew - but now a mysterious Baron is fronting the money to re-open it. He’s also somehow managed to find Constance Greene, sequestered in Aloysius’s Riverside mansion he wants to win her loyalty away from Pendergast, and slowly attempts to befriend her and turn her against her guardian.Īt the Museum, Nora Kelly is back, tapped to organise the Museum’s next big exhibit: an authentic Egyptian tomb, first installed in the 1930s, which closed and was walled off after a series of strange accidents happened in connection with it. His true goal is on a much larger scale, and he uses his alter ego’s position at the Museum to set it into motion. His planned apotheosis wasn’t stealing the Museum’s jewels, nor was it framing Aloysius for the murders. Meanwhile, Diogenes is taking advantage of Aloysius’s incarceration to set his real ultimate crime into motion. He’s working with Eli Glinn, a forensic psychologist introduced to the Pendergast series in Dance with Death to analyse Diogenes, and who apparently appears first in Ice Limit, another P&C novel that I haven’t read.
Vincent D’Agosta is taking a much more active role in clearing Pendergast’s name, risking his own career and his relationship with Laura in order to break Aloysius out of prison. Diogenes’s frame job was masterful, near-perfect - but there are just enough holes to be holding up the trial, and Laura Heyward finds herself investigating them despite herself.
DIOGENES PENDERGAST TRIAL
To begin with, Aloysius Pendergast is in a maximum security prison, awaiting trial for several murders and for the theft of the jewel collection of the Museum of Natural History - all crimes perpetrated by his brother, Diogenes, during the last book. Like Brimstone, this book has a lot going on, a lot of different threads that weave in and out of each other. Perhaps coincidentally, it’s also the first Pendergast novel I read. This is probably my favourite Pendergast novel. Spoiler Warning: Spoilers for Dance with Death Title: The Book of the Dead (Pendergast #7)Īuthor: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
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