Fever Dream

Symptoms of having a fever dream: feeling cold, shivering, restlessness.

Symptoms of reading FEVER DREAM: content smile, lack of free time.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s latest team effort, FEVER DREAM, is the 10th in their long line of thrillers featuring the ever-eccentric FBI Agent Aloysius X.L. Pendergast. Having recently tackled Tibetian spirits and West Indian zombies, Pendergast now deals with the supposedly less dangerous threat of stuffed avians. Yes, as the cover image suggests, this standalone novel is kind of about birds, but at least it’s not for them.

It begins with a crackling prologue: a flashback to a dozen years ago in Zambia, Africa, where a pre-Bureau Pendergast and his wife, Helen, are vacationing and hunting. Reports are made of a lion with an unusually dark mane killing a German tourist, so the happy couple agrees to track this beast and snuff it out before more lives are lost. Unfortunately, one is: Helen.

In the present day, while making a contractual trip to his grandfather’s grave at the family mansion in Louisiana, Pendergast makes a shocking discovery that his beloved wife’s death wasn’t an accident at all, but an act of premeditated murder. But how to prove such a thing so long after the fact, and when many of the players are now dead?

To do so, Pendergast solicits the help of NYPD Lt. Vincent D’Agosta, telling him to take a leave of absence from the force. Their job will be simple: Determine exactly who’s responsible, then kill him. Well, at least it seems simple, but in fact, takes them all over the globe.

And the birds? Let’s just say that Helen had her secrets that a little birdie didn’t tell Pendergast, until now.

Although this is a standalone effort, where events aren’t paying off those dangling from a previous novel, there still are so many threads of the characters’ pasts woven in without much explanation that I wouldn’t recommend newbies to start here. They wouldn’t necessarily be lost — just a tad flummoxed, but otherwise into it.

As for longtime fans of the Preston/Child oeuvre, they’re likely to be enthralled, if to a slightly lesser degree than usual. Given the pared-down spectrum of protagonists, FEVER DREAM feels a little like a bridge, smaller in scope than the usual Pendergast tale, and more grounded in reality. Yes, it’s a bit odd, and not just with all things Audubon weighing heavily into the narrative, but remember: Pendergast is odd personified.

In the end, he is what again makes the book stand out against the spate of standard thrillers. He’s a most unconventional crimefighter with idiosyncratic tastes and most unorthodox investigation methods. There’s not quite another do-gooder as guarded and gifted as he; Preston and Child have now written him through so many binds and battles that it carries a whiff of effortlessness. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• BLASPHEMY by Douglas Preston
• THE BOOK OF THE DEAD by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
• CEMETERY DANCE by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
• DANCE OF DEATH by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
• DEEP STORM by Lincoln Child
• IMPACT by Douglas Preston
• THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
• TERMINAL FREEZE by Lincoln Child
• TYRANNOSAUR CANYON by Douglas Preston
• THE WHEEL OF DARKNESS by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Related posts:

1. Cover unearthed for Preston/Child’s BOOK OF THE DEAD
2. Dance of Death
3. The Wheel of Darkness
4. Cemetery Dance
5. The Book of the Dead