DOUGLAS PRESTON & LINCOLN CHILD – The Pendergast Trilogy:

       1. Fever Dream. Grand Central Publishing, hardcover, May 2010. Vision, paperback, April 2011.

       2. Cold Vengeance. Grand Central, hardcover, August 2011; paperback, February 2012.

       3. Two Graves. Grand Central, hardcover, December 2012; paperback, July 2013.

   These three books by bestselling writing team Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Relic, The Ice Limit, Gideon’s Sword) comprise the first trilogy within the series that features the brilliant, wealthy, and eccentric FBI agent, Aloysius Pendergast. Previously Special Agent Pendergast and his friend Lieutenant Vincent D’Acosta of New York homicide appeared in a number of stand alone books including Relic/Reliquary and Dance of Death/Book of the Dead which were tied together. The second duo consisted of Pendergast’s battle with his mad brother Diogenes, a master criminal.

   That name, Diogenes, should be a clue to Pendergast’s origins, because he is very much a Sherlockian figure (in Wheel of Darkness he even travels to Tibet with his student Constance), given to keeping his own council, brilliant deductions, and epic battles with his own Moriarity.

   That said, these are not properly mystery novels and certainly not detective stories. They are pulp nonsense on a high level, and Pendergast is less Holmesian than a more literate and literary Richard Wentworth or Lamont Cranston, replete with his mysterious Brownstone lair Bruce Wayne might envy.

   We’re in the country of Frank Packard’s Jimmie Dale, the Gray Seal here, or even Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. The devil is in the details, and the details are for, all the trappings, these are not mystery novels half so much as apocalyptic pulp adventure that Lester Dent or Norvel Page would have recognized as such. The books have a sort of dream-like logic of their own and frequently stray into quasi-science fiction and the supernatural with the same casual verve of the pulps of the past.

   Beginning in Fever Dream we learn that twelve years ago Pendergast’s beloved wife Helen was killed in a hunting accident in Africa on their honeymoon and that Pendergast blames himself. When he discovers Helen was murdered, he sets out for revenge leading to the swamps of Mississippi and a madman cursed with a disease that renders him hypersensitive to life, thanks to forbidden experiments begun by Nazi doctors before WWII.

   Cold Vengeance finds Pendergast discovering his greatest ally, his bother-in-law Judson Estrhazy, may in reality be Helen’s murderer, and to an even more shocking revelation that Helen isn’t dead at all. As he probes the conspiracy swirling about him he moves from Scotland to the bayous of Louisiana and to Central Park where Helen is swept from his arms just as he is about to be reunited.

   Two Graves finds Pendergast very nearly destroyed by his obsessive hunt, withdrawn from his closest friends and allies, pitted against a diabolical serial killer, and about to solve a mystery he would be better off never solving as his adventure carries him to dense South American jungles and a revelation about Helen and himself that will shock him to his core.

   I won’t give more away though you will likely beat Pendergast to the final revelations by at least two and a half books. I am surprised though that it is done this well, considering that elements of the plot weren’t all that new when Ira Levin wrote The Boys From Brazil. They do manage to tie all three books rather neatly into a whole though, which I would have thought impossible for anyone else.

   Half the fun of these is that Preston and Child do get away with things that you wouldn’t allow a lesser writer because they are literate, playful, fun, and inventive (in Brimstone the villain is Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, no less).

   All their books, together and separately, are fun, and I confess the non series Ice Limit and Riptide had some extremely clever ideas in them I wish I had used. Even their novels on their own are highly entertaining, and Preston’s non-fiction Dinosaurs in the Attic about his years at the New York Museum of Natural History is a delightful memoir.

   It’s rare to find anyone this literate, or with their dry wit on the bestseller lists these days. They know exactly what they are doing and do it well. Dumas would have admired Pendergast’s prison break in Dance of Death; Relic is a modern classic and was a terrific film (minus Pendergast but with Tom Sizemore as D’Acosta), though I don’t think most of the Pendergast books would work all that well on screen; and A Cabinet of Curiosities a rare serial killer novel that thrills as much as it intrigues.

   In addition they have created their own little world with characters from other novels appearing in the Pendergast series, with most recently one of the protagonists of Ice Limit showing up in the new Gideon series. If you have ever wondered what Walter Gibson or Norvel Page might have done given the time to polish and play with their apocalyptic adventures these might at least give you an idea.

   Enter this world with willing suspension of disbelief set on high and you are in for high concept entertainment done in a grand guignol style and at least a shadow of Holmesian panache if not detective skills.

   In the right mood and mind set, these are probably the best bang for your buck you will find on recent bestselling bookshelves. These deliver as much as the back copy reviews promise and more.