Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s “Badlands” (June, hardcover) is comfortingly familiar: a New Mexico badlands setting, a weird mystery, and anthropologist Nora Kelly and young FBI agent Corrie Swanson investigating it. Saying “comforting” shouldn’t undercut how expertly written it is, though.
Child and Preston, who lives in New Mexico and is the duo’s expert on the area’s geography and history, continue to believably make the state into a Mars on Earth – filled with little-explored, almost inaccessible lands and dangers. Here, they benefit from the fact that you can’t libel or slander a millennium-gone race, the Gallina Indians.
They were totally wiped out in what appears to be a genocide by a rival tribe, and rumors say the Gallina were evil witches. No modern tribe acknowledges them as ancestors, and the fossil record backs this up. P&C interweave this ancient puzzle with a modern head-scratcher: A healthy 40-year-old woman wanders into the desert, strips off her clothes and dies, in what appears to be a suicide.
“Badlands” (2025)
Authors: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Series: Nora Kelly No. 5
Genres: Mystery, thriller
Setting: New Mexico, present day
Daringly, “Badlands” starts with this scene. By showing us something bizarre right up front, we don’t get the thrill of discovery for this one strange instance, but that cues me to think more strangeness is coming later. It is, in a good way. (“Dead Mountain,” the previous Nora novel, is similarly plotted, but it leaves mysterious elements to the opening stinger.) A later strength of the book is how it tiptoes to the edge of the supernatural without going too far, as – arguably – some recent P&C books have done.
As readers know, although this is labeled “A Nora Kelly Novel,” this series is an equal effort between the two women. Indeed, Corrie is the first to learn about the deceased woman – discovered five years later (nicely cueing us to the desertedness of large swaths of New Mexico) – and then she does her usual thing of calling in her friend Nora for help due to the anthropological and archaeological elements.
Old mysteries in New Mexico
Since we’re explicitly told the woman died in 2020, the novel is set in 2025, and thus we have to accept a sliding timeline for P&C novels, which has always been the case, but it’s notable that the authors don’t hide it anymore. Corrie should technically be in her 30s and Nora in her 50s, but they read as about 10 years younger.
Via Corrie and her colleagues, P&C have firmly made the Nora novels into what “The X-Files” used to do. We get a generally positive, sympathetic portrayal of the FBI, which could be disconcerting or disingenuous when one looks at the real-world FBI. As with “The X-Files,” I accept it in fiction form because there I liked Mulder and Scully and here I like Corrie and her aptly named mentor, Sharp.
And I suppose if reality truly did find ancient-yet-pressing mysteries popping out of unexplored sands in the USA, we’d say it’s taxpayer money well spent. This isn’t to say P&C give a free pass to all federal policies: The book includes critiques (or at least acknowledgements) of bizarre legal situations such as the checkerboard pattern of Indian versus federal lands, and the fact that people can own land but have no say whatsoever in the access of what’s beneath the surface, let alone ability to make money from it. The workers on one fracking project read like characters from “Mad Max.”
“Badlands” is a consistent page-turner as we sense each of Corrie’s and Nora’s small discoveries – in the FBI labs and via field interviews — are building to something big. Present-day events increase the foreboding. Edison Nash, the friend of Nora’s brother Skip, is a classic P&C character: He sees himself as being above what society considers sacred issues; he’s fine with taking artifacts from ruins for his private collection. We know karma won’t work out in his favor.
Sometimes P&C’s payoffs aren’t as good as the buildup, but “Badlands” pays off well, as the sense of ancient intrigue smoothly morphs into modern-day danger and weirdness for our heroes. “Badlands” doesn’t break new ground – via fracking or via storytelling structure – but provides all the thrills and fascinating history lessons fans could hope for in a Nora and Corrie novel.