Last year’s “Gideon’s Sword” was a somewhat rocky start to Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s new Gideon Crew series that felt a bit like a James Bond update. The second novel, “Gideon’s Corpse” (January, hardcover) is a significant step up and it calls to mind a more contemporary influence, the TV series “24.”
What’s more, Gideon starts to become a fully fleshed-out character here. Yeah, as with Jack Bauer, there’s a lot of stuff happening to our hero rather than him initiating the action. But whereas he was operating solo for a lot of the first book, here he interacts with various characters, namely a partner from the FBI named Stone Fordyce who is by-the-book even though he kinda hates regulations, and a romantic interest named Alida who initially despises him.
But even with the characters popping off the page more, “Gideon’s Corpse” ultimately is notable for its “24”-style plotting where the story starts in one place and finishes in another after making tons of twists and turns (the terrorism theme also makes the comparison hard to resist). This isn’t A-to-B plotting; we’re talking about the whole alphabet being used. The yarn includes everything from a plane crash to hiding from the law in caves to a furious cross-country road trip.
Settings, another strength of these authors who so vividly recreate museum basements and Delta swamps in their Pendergast books, aren’t quite as good here. Crew lives in New Mexico, and further action takes place in New York and Washington, D.C., but we don’t get much time to revel in the various settings.
“Corpse” is also slightly more political than most Preston and Child books, as the authors aren’t shy about showing the absurd number of government agencies involved in this case. It’s almost a parody of governmental redundancy.
The mystery is pretty decent — at one point Crew references Sherlock Holmes — although it’s kind of like “24” in that the action moves so fast you don’t get a chance to mull over clues.
I still prefer the Pendergast books (the next entry, “Two Graves,” which concludes the agent’s search for his long-missing wife, is due in December), but I have no problem making space in my reading schedule for the Crew novels, too — especially with “24” no longing airing.