To research the book, Preston and a friend retraced on horseback 1, miles of Coronado's route across Arizona and New Mexico, packing their supplies and sleeping under the stars--nearly killing themselves in the process.
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 s Preston and Child teamed up to write suspense novels; Relic was the first, followed by several others, including Riptide and Thunderhead.
Relic was released as a motion picture by Paramount in Other films are under development at Hollywood studios. Preston and Child live miles apart and write their books together via telephone, fax, and the Internet. Preston and his brother Richard are currently producing a television miniseries for ABC and Mandalay Entertainment, to be aired in the spring of , if all goes well, which in Hollywood is rarely the case.
Preston continues a magazine writing career by contributing regularly to The New Yorker magazine. Search review text. Ah, finally a Pendergast that feels a little bit more old school. Maybe not quite as intricate and mysterious and Relic and Cabinet of Curiosities , but still has the feel of one of the earlier books.
Being back in the streets of New York probably helps. There were a couple of plot points that did feel a bit silly and out of place.
One of them I thought was building up to be a pretty big deal and kind of fizzled out. So, in the department of fleshing out multiple storylines, this one was not quite as good as some of the others. I guess if you really, really wanted to, you could read this one without reading the others, but you would be missing so much of the backstory. My recommendation is still to go get a copy of Relic, start at the beginning, and enjoy the ride. I keep trying to write more, and I just keep typing spoilers!
I guess I am going to have to wrap this review up or I am going to give everything away! Okay, so one spoilerish thing about the Epilogue. Then, they have to go and add a final scene where Pendergast goes and gets her.
The headless daughter of a millionaire is found, Pendergast who is in disgrace with the FBI after his last outing is assigned the case. Although working again with his friend, Detective D'Agosta, Pendergast shows little interest, taking it for the punishment it is meant to be. But then, more headless corpses, beheaded of wealthy New Yorkers, men who have the best security money can buy.
Yet, someone is managing to penetrate these systems. Pendergast for much of the book is working in the background, his ghostly presence shadowing D'Agosta, at odds with the city's theory of why these killings are taking place.
It is with welcome relief I welcome back a Pendergast story that doesn't include any of his nefarious and very strange family. Not that I do not find them interesting but though with the previous books this subject had been overdone. This is back to form, Pendergast doing what he does best. Seeing things others do not see,putting things together in a way other cannot. Though in this one there s the very real possibility that Pendergast has met his match.
Someone he cannot out think, anticipate. The scene in the old asylum, the cat and mouse game that ensues was suspenseful and harrowing. I won't say this is the best in series, but I do think it is the best in the last several years. ARC from Netgalley. I have read them all and if possible they get better and better.
This one starts out with a young, spoiled New York socialite found murdered and decapitated. Who would want to kill this young woman? Then another murder occurs with the same M. Is there a serial killer roaming the streets of New York? As always Pendergast is exceptional and a detective to the highest order, quirks and all. Fast paced with twists and turns. I was surprised and I like that.
I highly recommend this book and actually the whole series. Can be read as a stand-alone although some small references to past books. They dart into an old abandoned property and dive into a pile of leaves that have blown into a darkened corner. Their temporary refuge smells of mold and something definitely rank. The leaves shift with their squirming and a dead body reveals itself. The source of the screaming comes from the boys themselves Not to worry, though.
City of Endless Night reads as a stellar standalone with only tiny dots of the past. You most certainly can hit the ground running with this one.
It's that good. He's the lead detective assigned to this horrendous case. But neither is prepared to face a team of killers as diabolical as this. It will take all of Pendergast and D'Agosta's intelligence and strength simply to match wits with their latest adversaries--let alone stay alive.
Get A Copy. Kindle Edition. Published September 26th by Grand Central Publishing. More Details Other Editions 3. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book.
This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Note: The Pendergast series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child should be read in order because each novel builds on the previous novels, though not necessarily in a directly linear fashion.
Pendergast, a history going back to the Civil War. I read them out of order! I don't recommend that. It's been a great Coronavirus companion, but I'm glad to put it behind me. Too much of a good thing can be too much! As you'll recall, the previous book— The Obsidian Chamber —began with both Aloysius and Diogenes Pendergast thought dead, the latter at the hands of Constance Greene as revenge for Diogenes' emotional cruelty, the former drowned off of Exmouth, Massachusetts at the end of Crimson Shore The Obsidian Chamber ended with a revitalized Diogenes living with Constance on Halcyon Key, a private island in the Florida Keys, where Diogenes had built an idyllic estate for Constance as penance for his earlier mistreatment.
He thought he had won her love again, but in fact she's playing a long game to destroy him. The The City of Endless Night begins with discovery of a corpse hidden in a pile of leaves. It's the decapitated body of Grace Ozmian, twenty-three years old and the daughter of New York billionaire Anton Ozmian; her head is still missing.
Oddly, the decapitation occurred twenty four hours after the death—the killer left her in the leaves, then came back for her head. NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta catches the case and Pendergast has been brought into the case because Ozmian is very influential and has been pushing buttons over his daughter's disappearance. Cantucci has already had six attempts on his life and he's protected his townhouse with a top-drawer security system having multiple security cameras and sensors.
But now the sensor system is dead and only the camera system is active. Through a camera Cantucci sees an intruder on the entry floor; he's carrying a compound bow and several arrows. The elevator rises to the third floor, where Cantucci waits with a handgun. But when the elevator door opens, it's empty! Cantucci dies; he also loses his head. We discover that this is an inside job—someone extremely familiar with the security system, probably an installer, was able to hack it and even to feed false videos images into the system to mislead Cantucci about the perps whereabouts in the five-floor townhouse.
D'Agosta learns that Grace Ozmian is stereotypical rich kid with a nose for drugs and a series of conflicts with the law that were resolved by her father. The latest was running down and killing a kid walking along the side of a road while driving her BMW: she was both drunk and high at the time. The kid's mother committed suicide and the father lost his landscaping business and moved away to become a bartender; Grace spent one month of community service flipping pancakes two mornings a week.
The kid's father certainly has a motive to kill Grace Ozmian, but he was out of New York state when she was killed. So he seems to be innocent of Grace's murder. Now we see a figure in dark clothing climbing the wall of a large and heavily guarded Long Island estate. The intruder intentionally breaks a laser beam on the wall to trigger an alarm, then kills the two guards and guard dogs that come to investigate.
After killing four more guards, he gets into the house and places a flash-bang on the locked steel door into the owner's bedroom. Then he uses an access door in the adjacent bedroom to get into the panic room. When the flash-bang goes off, the owner rushes into the panic room and finds his killer confronting him. Borgachov dies, along with five guards and two guard dogs. He is decapitated. The intruder walks away. The murders continue. Number three is an older couple who've become very rich running a crooked mortgage company that makes mortgage loans to veterans who are destined to default, then it forecloses on the properties and makes big money on the resale.
They are found dead in their office, both bodies decapitated. Somehow they had been trapped in their office and decapitated and the killer walked out with two heads—all during the day when the building was filled with people. A common characteristic of the murder victims, other than decapitation, is that they have all become very rich by exploiting others.
All victims were immediately decapitated except Grace Ozmian, whose head stayed on for a day after her death. Bryce Harriman, a New York Post reporter who skulks in other Pendergast books, calls the killer "The Decapitator" and reports that the murders are some sort of social revenge for the exploitation of the masses—it's an outcry against the one-percenters. That theory is getting legs among Post readers and the public. Pendergast believes that the murders are connected, but D'Agosta and the police think that they are copycat murders done by different perps.
In short, nobody knows anything except that very rich and very flawed people are losing their heads. She is in New York to speak at the United Nations. She and her entourage are heavily guarded because of a fatwah issued by Boko Haram. As she, her entourage, and the audience sweep out into the lobby after the speech, two smoke bombs go off. When the smoke clears Adeyemi is found, dead—and headless. This is clearly a departure from the Decapitator's usual victim, and it puts Bryce Harriman's theory to a test.
To restore the theory, he must find some evidence that in her past the "Saint of Nigeria" has dark clouds and wealth. But Pendergast warns him that he will find no smoking guns to shoehorn her into his theory. Meanwhile, Harriman has his own immediate problem. Ozmian has digitally forged a paper trail that transferring funds from a charity he directs to his personal account.
Publication date Usage Public Domain Mark 1. Set in and in an underground Berlin, our protagonist is Lyman De Forrest, an American chemist who enters the city to discover the hidden truths of a forbidden metropolis. The subterranean world hosts a highly-regimented society of ,, sun-starved humans. As the first outsider to enter, he's horrified by what he finds, but will he accomplish his mission and escape the living tomb?
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