“Fever Dream,” the latest Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child novel, opens with FBI Special Agent Pendergast and his wife, Helen, hunting a lion in Africa. I thought, “Uh oh, I don’t really want to read P&C’s take on ‘The Ghost and the Darkness.’ “
But I didn’t give them enough credit. The flashback to the death of Pendergast’s wife only takes up the first couple of chapters. It turns out that the novel is broadly about Pendergast’s search for his wife’s killer, but somehow it encompasses an exploration of the painting skills of naturalist John James Audubon and the uncovering of a crooked pharmaceutical firm.
While our favorite FBI special agent doesn’t get back to the New York Museum of Natural History (a setting that I could practically live in), the yarn does at least bring us back to Pendergast’s deliciously sprawling New York home. Familiar friends return, too, in the form of Pendergast’s reluctant partner, police Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, and his fiancée, Captain Laura Hayward.
The New York stops are brief, though, as “Fever Dream” (May 2010, hardcover) is mostly a trip down South. Pendergast and his partner make stops at several southern towns as he follows often-sketchy leads, and I can practically taste every one of those towns. When they dig through a long-sealed basement for an old painting; get chased across a hot, gator-infested Mississippi swamp; or pick through an abandoned home and find bizarre clues, I never exactly wished I was there. But I did appreciate that I had a first-class window on the characters that are there. So much happens from cover to cover, and yet I never felt like the story was rushed; I was able to savor the adventure.
The authors continue the trend of getting more personal with their characters with each passing book. Pendergast continually impresses D’Agosta (and the reader, for whom the lieutenant is a surrogate of sorts) with his meticulousness, and yet in “Fever Dream,” his emotions often get the best of him. Pendergast promises Hayward he won’t kill his wife’s murderer, but this is a rare case where we can’t take the agent at his word. Usually, as a reader, we trust Pendergast; suddenly, we’re a bit wary.
As is a pattern in the Pendergast novels, “Fever Dream” lays the groundwork for future novels. The agent’s brother, Diogenes, is history, so P&C introduce another villain here, and this one also has a personal connection to our protagonist. Then there’s the mysterious Constance Greene, seemingly a young woman but apparently born in the 1870s. An explanation for this greatest of P&C head-scratchers is coming in future books, and I don’t mind waiting, because with P&C it’s always worth the wait; in the meantime, we can chew over the morsels on Constance they dole out with a chapter here, a chapter there, in “Fever Dream.”
Also of interest to fans, P&C announce in the back of “Fever Dream” that they’ll be launching a new investigative series with a new agent, Gideon Crew, starting this winter. They’re quick to note, though, that they’ll continue to write Pendergast novels on their same once-a-year schedule.
I’d rank “Fever Dream” in fourth place among the Pendergast novels, behind “Still Life with Crows,” a standalone mystery masterpiece, and the “Relic”/“Reliquary” duology, for which I will always have a soft spot, because those are the books that started it all.