Preston-Childs fans unite, but be warned. This book is best read with the others underneath your belt. A least the one before it, Fever Dream, if you want to understand this one. The other ten if you want the full impact. Do not pick this book up going, ‘Oh! A week-end beach read!’ This is not a beach read. If you want knitting patterns and recipes, the cozy mysteries section is out back.

Once again Preston and Child both grasp the mysterious aspects of their most memorable characters, this time with the biggest mystery of all; whatever happened to Pendergast’s wife? Killed in Africa, or something else?

This review will be extremely short for many reasons. These books are to be shared among fans once completed. There is something of a following, where at the last page we grip out fellow fans by the shoulders in an overdose of joyful emotions and express our hopes and fears about the upcoming book and the book now finished.

This is one of the best in the series, sending the characters, and readers, off a precipice where we’ll have to wait and see where and how we land.

For those of you considering the series, please pick it up, and stick with it. The books are always beautifully written, the characters become instant favorites, and there is no genre or category with enough strength to keep these novels in. I love the style the prose, and the plots that I can never compare to anything else I’ve ever read. Some people have the ability to describe these books to inquiring fellow readers, I do not. I can only tell you to read them.

(If you are interested in discussing the book further because you have read it, feel free to message me.)