Reliquary (Special Agent Pendergast Series #2)
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Overview
When police divers find two skeletons locked in a bony embrace deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, Natural History Museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid in the investigation. However, she soon learns that she is needed for more than just her anthropological expertise. The authorities also want her for reasons she has been struggling to forget: her experience the prior year, battling a horrific beast loose in the basement corridors of the Museum. The mystery of the skeletons is deepened by a string of brutal murders. Aided by police lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, the enigmatic FBI agent Pendergast, and the brilliant scientist Dr. Frock, Margo reluctantly begins tracking down their source. The investigation leads them to deserted warehouses, burned-out laboratories, the underground lairs of homeless "mole people" - and, at last, to the stupendous warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries that riddle the bedrock far beneath Manhattan, where the ultimate secret of the Museum Beast is at last revealed.Synopsis
When police find two skeletons locked in a bony embrace deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, Natural History Museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid in the investigation. She soon realizes that the expertise the cops want is the result of her ordeal last year, battling the horrific beast loose in the basement corridors of the Museum. Because the skeletons show signs, not only of foul play, but of abnormalities point to thing: the awakening of a slumbering nightmare. Aided by Lieutenant D'Agosta, the enigmatic FBI agent Pendergast, and the brilliant scientist Dr. Frock, the search for answers will take Margo and her team far beneath the city of Manhattan, into an underworld few know exist - and fewer still would dare to go.
Publishers Weekly
The netherworld of New York Cityits subways, aqueducts, sewers and the homeless who inhabit themproves as shuddery a setting for the authors' latest scientific monster mash as the American Museum of Natural History did for their bestselling Relic, to which this is the sequel. In the earlier novel, Mbwun, a ferocious creature that seemed part reptile, part human, rampaged through the museum killing people. The sequel, set 18 months after Mbwun was destroyed, opens with a police diver finding the headless bodies of two people apparently killed by underground cannibals. The corpses are sent to the museum's lab for analysis, which brings a number of returnees from Relicburly homicide cop Vincent D'Agosta, anthropologist Margo Green, New York Post crime reporter Bill Smithbackto the case. They're soon joined by the novels' Sherlock Holmes figure, the irresistibly cool Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI. Forays by these principals into the kingdom of the Mole People (underground homeless), plus some forensic breakthroughs, point to a race of mini-Mbwun at work in an escalating series of savage killings that incite the city's upper crust to civil disobedience. The city's answer, to flood its nether vaults, turns out to threaten a global catastrophe that only Pendergast and company, aided by Navy SEALS, can avert. The story's "surprise" ending makes as much sense as ketchup on popcorn, and the entire novel has a desperate air about it as the authors stuff it with complications and, by pitting the homeless against the swells, try to create a kind of Decapitation of the Vanities. It's high on suspense and tremendous fun in parts, though, especially when exploring the city's nightmare underbelly. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections. (May)
Editorials
Philadelphia Inquirer
Reads like a summer roller-coaster flick.The Orlando Sentinel
Hits all the right buttons for those looking for thrills and chills from things that go bump in the night.Publishers Weekly
The netherworld of New York Cityits subways, aqueducts, sewers and the homeless who inhabit themproves as shuddery a setting for the authors' latest scientific monster mash as the American Museum of Natural History did for their bestselling Relic, to which this is the sequel. In the earlier novel, Mbwun, a ferocious creature that seemed part reptile, part human, rampaged through the museum killing people. The sequel, set 18 months after Mbwun was destroyed, opens with a police diver finding the headless bodies of two people apparently killed by underground cannibals. The corpses are sent to the museum's lab for analysis, which brings a number of returnees from Relicburly homicide cop Vincent D'Agosta, anthropologist Margo Green, New York Post crime reporter Bill Smithbackto the case. They're soon joined by the novels' Sherlock Holmes figure, the irresistibly cool Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI. Forays by these principals into the kingdom of the Mole People (underground homeless), plus some forensic breakthroughs, point to a race of mini-Mbwun at work in an escalating series of savage killings that incite the city's upper crust to civil disobedience. The city's answer, to flood its nether vaults, turns out to threaten a global catastrophe that only Pendergast and company, aided by Navy SEALS, can avert. The story's "surprise" ending makes as much sense as ketchup on popcorn, and the entire novel has a desperate air about it as the authors stuff it with complications and, by pitting the homeless against the swells, try to create a kind of Decapitation of the Vanities. It's high on suspense and tremendous fun in parts, though, especially when exploring the city's nightmare underbelly. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections. (May)Library Journal
No one is too concerned about the mysterious remains of anonymous homeless people until middle- and upper-class victims are found headless. Pendergast (FBI), Green (anthropologist), and D'Agosta (NYPD) from The Relic (Brilliance Corp., 1995) join forces to subdue what turns out to be a violent mutant race living underground. While some may like gruesome stories where people eat roasted rats in dark tunnels and monsters decapitate subway riders, this story did not become interesting until the last few cassettes. At this point, reader Dick Hill's pacing adds urgency and captures the listener's attention during a last-ditch effort to save not just the city but civilization as we know it. A straight reading might be more efficacious than dramatic caricatures of New Yorkers, mad scientists, Southerners, and women. Yet the production is hampered by technical adjustment to the various voices. For instance, the expression of characters' thoughts reverberates like a whisper in a megaphone; police voices emerging from gas masks during tunnel action are muffled and almost inaudible. These unnecessary elements are distracting and add to the impression that one is listening to a spoof of a horror story. Not recommended.Juleigh Muirhead Clark, Williamsburg, Va.School Library Journal
The curator of the Natural History Museum rejoins police and the FBI as they attempt to solve horrific murders. A frightening sequel to The Relic, it's a terrific read on its own. (Sept.)Orlando Sentinel
The sequel to the popular The Relic hits all the right buttons for those looking for thrills and chills from things that go bump in the night....Another page-turner that cries out for translation to the silver screenLocus
"A slam-bang horrific SF adventure of hte most cinematic kind."The Chicago Tribune
"This follow-up to [The Relic] is every bit as good and in some ways better. Preston and Child carry off this sequel with great energy and panache...their portrait of the underground dwellers lifts this thriller into a category all its own."Kirkus Reviews
The doughty crew that bested Mbwun, a flesh-eating Amazonian creature that stalked its victims through Manhattan's Museum of Natural History, in Relic (1994), faces a new but all too familiar threat.When the skeletal remains of a socially prominent young woman are flushed out of an Upper West Side storm drain, sans skull, NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta seeks assistance from anthropologist Margo Green and her sometime mentor Dr. Frock. With timely help from a mysterious FBI agent known only as Pendergast, the technocrats eventually put paid to the reptilian Museum Beast that, deprived of its dietary staple (a lily indigenous to Brazil's rainforest), had found human brains an acceptable substitute. Suspecting the past and present cases may be linked, D'Agosta becomes convinced when he learns that the decapitation rate among the underground homeless is on the rise. Pendergast reaches out to the subterranean community, discovering it's being depopulated by brutish beings who dwell in the so-called Devil's Attic, a network of railroad tunnels linking Grand Central Terminal with the suburbs. Meantime, Margo learns that a former colleague has genetically engineered an equivalent of the Mbwun lily (for its narcotic and regenerative properties), which can survive in the Northern Hemisphere. While the unfortunate young man's work went awry, another evil genius took on the project, and monster edibles are growing in the Central Park Reservoir. D'Agosta's panicky superiors decide to exterminate the predatory new mole people (who revere a mad scientist as their messiah) by flooding the Devil's Attic. Once the point of no return is passed, however, Margo determines that the toxic lilies could wash out to sea and do irreparable harm to Earth's food chain. With but hours to go until a wall of water from upstate basins sweeps through the netherworld caverns, then, Pendergast and a band of Navy SEALs must battle their way into the pitch-black abyss to keep the flow contained.
Ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. . . in rerun.