After a few in my opinion rather strange attempts to have Agent Pendergast and/or his protégée Constance Greene travel back in time and to transform this great thriller series into some form of fantasy / speculative fiction novels, Douglas Preston and Douglas Child use Pendergast The Beginning, the 23rd Pendergast mystery, to go back to his early days as a rookie FBI agent. CLICK TO BUY AT AMAZON
Pendergast The Beginning opens strong with a funeral gone horribly wrong, a security guard being kidnapped the day of a big transfer of goods, and a sting operation bearing Pendergast’s signature right in the New Orleans FBI office. (However, the idea of Pendergast using a Polaroid camera to document the sting operation is a bit too much.)
Having pissed off the New Orleans FBI office manager, Pendergast and his to be mentor agent Chalmers are told to disappear for a while. This allows the agents to investigate a strange murder in Mississippi. The strange murder leads Pendergast and Chalmers to the conclusion there is a very clever and kinky serial killer out there. The reader knows the killer has a fetish for the perfectly developed male right arm. This covers the first half of Pendergast The Beginning and the first half of this mystery is where most such novels end. This being Preston & Child, there is much more to come.
Interestingly, the epilogue to Pendergast The Beginning is a chapter from the first Pendergast mystery, Relic. Does this mean Preston & Child have now come full circle and this is to be the last thriller in that storied if sometimes very weird franchise?
Fans of the series hoping for a purely biographical mystery about Pendergast will be disappointed. That said, there are biographical details sprinkled here and there like so many breadcrumbs. Also, fans of Pendergast will be happy to learn Preston & Child have set this mystery on much more normal ground, relatively speakibng of course.
Pendergast The Beginning by Preston & Child is an absolutely solid mystery and though the 23rd in the series it makes for a solid introduction to one of the most original detectives of the genre.
Pendergast The Beginning
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
Grand Central Publishing 2026
369 pages
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