Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child became my favorite authors when I started reading Relic, a horror thriller set in the American Museum of Natural History. Douglas Preston worked at the Museum as a writer and editor from 1978 to 1985 and was drawn to the sheer amount of detail about the museum’s inner workings. There he began a series of novels that would center on a very unusual protagonist, special agent Aloysius Pendergast.

Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, MA in 1956. He attended Pomona College and after exploring the sciences chose English literature as his area of ​​study. After working at the museum for eight years, he wrote a nonfiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. It was that book that led to his introduction and subsequent collaboration with Lincoln Child, the publisher of his book at St. Martin’s Press. His first book, Relic, was made into a movie in 1997 and was the start of a successful series of ten additional novels, Cold Vengeance, the latest, was released in August 2011.

Lincoln Child, was born in Westport, CT, and attended Carleton College majoring in English. His first position after college was at St. Martin’s Press, where he became full editor in 1984. He left the publication in 1987 to pursue a career at MetLife in computer programming and analysis, and in doing so began to devote himself to writing for parallel way. After Relic was published in 1995, he began writing full-time.

Both authors’ experiences in college and their professional careers can be felt in the detailed background they provide to both the characters and their stories. Throughout the series, they’ve introduced concepts that are somewhat fantastic, a serum to prevent aging or a drug that causes metamorphosis, but they’ve done it in a plausible way.

They have developed their characters throughout the series, many reappearing in novels after where they were first introduced, and their continued growth and development is not ignored in favor of the main character. But it’s that main character, Aloysius Pendergast, and his loyal friend, NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, that keep me coming back to his novels. Special Agent Pendergast is one of the most entertaining characters I’ve met in years. His experience as a member of a wealthy but queer New Orleans family that includes charletons and serial killers is an ever-unfolding delight.

His methods are just as eccentric as his family and include a bit of disguise, Tibetan meditation, Chongg Ran, psychological manipulation, and sheer brilliance. It is a charming enigma, whose history and background are discovered little by little throughout the series. While he started out almost as a superhero with his amazing abilities, in Preston and Childs’ latest series, the Helen trilogy, you get to see the character as a man, having lost his wife ten years earlier, and his subsequent discovery of a The cover-up causes cracks in that imperturbable exterior.