Pendergast — the world's most enigmatic FBI Special Agent — returns to New York City to investigate a murderous cult. William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor — a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier. While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta undertake their own private — and decidedly unorthodox — quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them to an enclave of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive, reclusive cult of Obeah and voodoo which no outsiders have ever survived.

In this case, Special Agent Pendergast doesn't want only justice; he seeks revenge. His wife Helen has been murdered, and his hunt for her killer will take him to faraway places and lead him to dangerous contacts. As his search takes him ever deeper into the secrets of Helen's life, he comes to the realization that the woman closest to him had held her secrets tightly. An exceptionally strong number of a bestseller series.

Die amerikanische Originalausgabe erschien 2008 unter dem Titel »Blasphemy« bei Forge Book.

A secret chamber.

A mysterious shipwreck.

A murder in the desolate salt marshes.

A seemingly straightforward private case turns out to be much more complicated-and sinister-than Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast ever could have anticipated.

Pendergast, together with his ward Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton.

Pendergast and Constance soon learn that Exmouth is a town with a very dark and troubled history, and this skeleton may be only the first hint of an ancient transgression, kept secret all these years. But they will discover that the sins of the past are still very much alive. Local legend holds that during the 1692 witch trials in Salem, the real witches escaped, fleeing north to Exmouth and settling deep in the surrounding salt marshes, where they continued to practice their wicked arts.

Then, a murdered corpse turns up in the marshes. The only clue is a series of mysterious carvings. Could these demonic symbols bear some relation to the ancient witches’ colony, long believed to be abandoned?

A terrible evil lurks beneath the surface of this sleepy seaside town-one with deep roots in Exmouth’s grim history. And it may be that Constance, with her own troubled past, is the only one who truly comprehends the awful danger that she, Pendergast, and the residents of Exmouth must face...

Agent Pendergast has become one of crime fiction's most endearing characters. His greatest enemy is one who has stalked him all of his life, his cunning and diabolical brother Diogenes. And Diogenes has thrown down the gauntlet. Now, several of the people closest to Pendergast are viciously murdered, and Pendergast is framed for the deeds. On the run from federal authorities, with only the help of his old friend NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, Pendergast must stop his brother. But how can he stop a man that is his intellectual equal-one who has had 20 years to plan the world's most horrendous crime?

Ähnlich wie Child, fliegt Preston hoch und schnell, das Werk verwandelt sich in einen höchst spannenden wissenschaftlichen Thriller.

Das Buch aus dem Titel ist ein Maya Artefakt das das gesamte Wissen der alten Kulturen über Medizin und Pflanzenkunde enthält.

Die darin enthaltenen Informationen wären jedem Pharmaunternehmen Milliarden wert, allerdings hat die Sache einen Haken. Das Buch wurde, zusammen mit einigen anderen unbezahlbaren Kunstschätzen tief im Dschungel Honduras von dem legendären Grabräuber Maxwell Broadbent mit ins sein eigenes Grab genommen. Er hat seinen drei Söhnen Informationen hinterlassen die zu dieser Stelle führen sollen. Da er ihnen nichts zutraut soll sie diese Suche zu „Männern“ machen.

Was nun folgt, ist ein atemberaubender Dschungelkampf der drei die jeder für sich einen besonderen Partner mitführen. Preston entführt den Leser in einen atemberaubenden Thriller aus Indianern, schiesswütigen Soldaten und irren Schatzsuchern.

Aus dem Amerikanischen von Ronald M. Hahn.

Die Originalausgabe erschien 2004 unter dem Titel »The Codex« bei Splendide Mendax, Inc., New York.

From #1 New York Times bestselling authors Preston & Child, an all-new short story featuring Agent Pendergast, available only as an ebook and audio download.

In New Orleans' French Quarter, the Tooth Fairy isn't a benevolent sprite who slips money under your pillow at night….he's a mysterious old recluse who must be appeased with teeth-lest he extract retribution. When young Diogenes Pendergast loses a tooth, however, his skeptical older brother Aloysius is determined to put the legend to the test…with dire consequences.

Edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci and including stories by Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, and more, this one-of-a-kind anthology pulls together the most beloved characters from the best and most popular thriller series today. Worlds collide!

In an unprecedented collaboration, twenty-three of the world’s bestselling and critically acclaimed thriller writers have paired their series characters — such as Harry Bosch, Jack Reacher, and Lincoln Rhyme — in an eleven-story anthology curated by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). All of the contributors to FaceOff are ITW members and the stories feature these dynamic duos:

• Patrick Kenzie vs. Harry Bosch in “Red Eye,” by Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly

• John Rebus vs. Roy Grace in “In the Nick of Time,” by Ian Rankin and Peter James

• Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast in “Gaslighted,” by R.L. Stine, Douglas Preston, and Lincoln Child

• Malachai Samuels vs. D.D. Warren in “The Laughing Buddha,” by M.J. Rose and Lisa Gardner

• Paul Madriani vs. Alexandra Cooper in “Surfing the Panther,” by Steve Martini and Linda Fairstein

• Lincoln Rhyme vs. Lucas Davenport in “Rhymes With Prey,” by Jeffery Deaver and John Sandford

• Michael Quinn vs. Repairman Jack in “Infernal Night,” by Heather Graham and F. Paul Wilson

• Sean Reilly vs. Glen Garber in “Pit Stop,” by Raymond Khoury and Linwood Barclay

• Wyatt Hunt vs. Joe Trona in “Silent Hunt,” by John Lescroart and T. Jefferson Parker

• Cotton Malone vs. Gray Pierce in “The Devil’s Bones,” by Steve Berry and James Rollins

• Jack Reacher vs. Nick Heller in “Good and Valuable Consideration,” by Lee Child and Joseph Finder

So sit back and prepare for a rollicking ride as your favorite characters go head-to-head with some worthy opponents in *FaceOff*—it’s a thrill-a-minute read.

A top nuclear scientist goes mad and takes an innocent family hostage at gunpoint, killing one and causing a massive standoff.

A plume of radiation above New York City leads to a warehouse where, it seems, a powerful nuclear bomb was assembled just hours before.

Sifting through the evidence, authorities determine that the unthinkable is about to happen: in ten days, a major American city will be vaporized by a terrorist attack.

Ten days. And Gideon Crew, tracking the mysterious terrorist cell from the suburbs of New York to the mountains of New Mexico, learns the end may be something worse--far worse--than mere Armageddon.

Introducing Gideon Crew: trickster, prodigy, master thief.

At twelve, Gideon Crew witnessed his father, a world-class mathematician, accused of treason and gunned down. At twenty-four, summoned to his dying mother's bedside, Gideon learned the truth: his father was framed and deliberately slaughtered. With her last breath, she begged her son to avenge him.

Now, with a new purpose in his life, Gideon crafts a one-time mission of vengeance, aimed at the perpetrator of his father's destruction. His plan is meticulous, spectacular, and successful.

But from the shadows, someone is watching. A very powerful someone, who is impressed by Gideon's special skills. Someone who has need of just such a renegade. For Gideon, this operation may be only the beginning…

From Booklist

Wyman Ford, the former CIA agent turned freelance investigator introduced in Blasphemy (2008), returns. This time the U.S. government sends him on a seemingly straightforward mission to locate a secret Cambodian mine, the source of some unusual gemstones. But Ford’s assignment quickly gets a lot more complicated, and soon he’s immersed in a mystery involving conspiracy, murder, and a strange object buried in a moon of Mars, an object that might be about to unleash something unimaginable upon Earth. Blasphemy felt almost claustrophobic at times (much of its action took place on a single set), but here the author opens up the stage, with plot threads unspooling in various countries and involving various supporting characters, who seem, at first, to have no connection to one another. Where Blasphemy tread on some controversial ground (the nature-of-God question), this book is a more traditional thriller, substituting adventure for philosophical exploration. Is it a better book or a worse one? Different readers may answer the question in different ways, but one thing’s for sure: once Preston kicks the story into high gear, they won’t put the book down until it’s finished.

The New York Museum of Natural History receives their pilfered gem collection back…ground down to dust. Diogenes, the psychotic killer who stole them in Dance of Death, is throwing down the gauntlet to both the city and to his brother, FBI Agent Pendergast, who is currently incarcerated in a maximum security prison. To quell the PR nightmare of the gem fiasco, the museum decides to reopen the Tomb of Senef. An astounding Egyptian temple, it was a popular museum exhibit until the 1930s, when it was quietly closed. But when the tomb is unsealed in preparation for its gala reopening, the killings-and whispers of an ancient curse-begin again. And the catastrophic opening itself sets the stage for the final battle between the two brothers: an epic clash from which only one will emerge alive.