Corrie Swanson and Nora Kelly, our two favorite women from the Preston-Childverse (with apologies to Constance Greene) return for their second combined adventure, “The Scorpion’s Tail” (January, hardcover). As was first seen in 2019’s “Old Bones,” young FBI agent-in-training Corrie and experienced archaeologist Nora play off each other in entertaining ways.
Budding friendship
I love how Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, in their 30th team-up book, don’t fast-forward Corrie from prickly teenager to confident Albuquerque-based FBI agent; instead they show us her rookie year. Bursts of immaturity (she is in her early 20s, after all) and impetuousness pop up, sometimes making her come off as selfish, but we love Corrie anyway because she is laser-focused on solving the case.
It’s highly amusing when she comes hard at Nora for a favor: professionally unearthing a corpse that’s been buried for 75 years in a ghost town.
For her part, Nora – with plenty of stress at her Santa Fe Archaeological Institute job — is annoyed by the younger woman yet she has the same enthusiasm for seeing a job well done and a case well pursued.
“Scorpion’s Tail” is a consistently smile-worthy story of these two women’s budding friendship – even if happens in antagonistic fashion – and it’s a great people piece overall. There isn’t a page of the book where I’m bored, because all of these folks are fascinating.
There’s also young Socorro County Sheriff Homer Watts (a possible love interest for Corrie); Jesse Gower, a would-be-novelist who deals with meth addiction and anger issues; and Corrie’s boss, Morwood, who is somewhat of a Jack Crawford to her Clarice Starling – giving her some rope, but not letting go of it.
An enchanting case
The case itself is juicy, as Preston and Child tap into New Mexico geography and history to tell an old-fashioned yet multi-pronged treasure-hunt and murder-mystery yarn. It goes all the way back to the first Indian-Spanish conflicts up through more recent military history, with some action taking place at White Sands Missile Range.
Having recently read Preston’s nonfiction books “Cities of Gold” and “Talking to the Ground,” I especially notice how he taps into his deep knowledge of the state’s history.
As I’ve also recently watched “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” and as I’m also a fan of “Roswell,” I have soaked up a good sense of the past and present, and the good and bad, of the Land of Enchantment, without having been there. (Which might be a good thing: Through all these works of fiction, New Mexico seems like a nice place to visit … through the written word or a TV screen.)
Rickety past comes alive
While “Scorpion’s Tail” will broadly remind readers of “Mount Dragon,” “Thunderhead” and “Tyrannosaur Canyon” – along with those nonfiction books by Preston – this one feels fairly fresh with its ghost town and treks to ranch houses in various states of disrepair. The authors bring the past alive, but in appropriately rickety and rundown fashion.
The mystery’s buildup is first-rate – complex yet easy to follow – and the conclusion deserves particular notice here. It’s thrilling and multi-threaded, and it includes some of the author’s favorite tropes, but it’s not overblown. The authors earn some remarkable moments at the end, having set the stage earlier.
While we’ve also (happily) seen a steady stream of Pendergast books lately, it seems Corrie and Nora have captured the authors’ fancy more so than, say, Gideon Crew or solo-novel projects. If that’s the case, I’m on board with this direction.