Book Blurb: The Wheel of Darkness

The Wheel of Darkness
By Douglas Preston, & Lincoln Child
(c) 2007; Mass Paperback released July 2008
Vision
492p

FBI Special Agent Pendergast is taking a break from work to take Constance on a whirlwind Grand Tour, hoping to give her closure and a sense of the world that she's missed. They head to Tibet, where Pendergast intensively trained in martial arts and spiritual studies. At a remote monastery, they learn that a rare and dangerous artifact the monks have been guarding for generations has been mysteriously stolen. As a favor, Pendergast agrees to track and recover the relic. A twisting trail of bloodshed leads Pendergast and Constance to the maiden voyage of the Britannia, the world's largest and most luxurious ocean liner---and to an Atlantic crossing fraught with terror.

I read Relic, the very first of the Preston/Child collaborations, a few years back and remember being disappointed that there weren't anymore yet. I don't know why I let ten new titles by this amazing duo go past me over the years. Maybe it has something to do with how rarely I browse library shelves lately, having taken to ordering my selections via the online catalog and picking them up in hurried stops at the small nearby branch of our fifteen branch library system. Whatever the reason, I was pleased to find this among the selection Hachette offered me for review. I read the excerpt offered at Hachette and was drawn right in by all the elements I love in this genre. Or is it a genre blend? It has all the elements of mysteries, thrillers, suspence, horror, paranormal. Their stories, at least the two I've been exposed to now, are woven into a fabric containing threads of ancient myth, ancient mysteries, ancient artifacts unearthed and ancient evils released.

Now I need to decide if I am going to read this one before going back to catch up with the previous ones--at least the ones featuring Agent Pendergass, of which there have been six since Relic. In an afterward Preston and Child say that The Wheel of Darkness is a stand alone tale so I do have a choice and this one is right here.

As announced in this post, this is the eighth of twelve Book Blurbs I plan to do for the review copies I received from Hachette books last month. There will also be more substantial book reviews for each of them as either Ed or I read them.