4 minute read
DIABLO MESA by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
diablo mesa
of President Henry Caine for a midlevel New York newspaper after the brash, self-serving POTUS is elected to a second term—and her lawyer husband, Ben, picked up stakes and moved to a city to which they had no previous ties? Why has a reporter showing up at their door and asking questions struck terror into Sofie’s heart? Over the course of the novel, Pitoniak will gradually unspool Sofie’s story as well as that of President Caine’s Moscow-born, Paris-raised, former-model wife, Lara, the beautiful, stylish, and self-possessed yet maddeningly (to the press and public) elusive first lady who has enlisted Sofie to write her biography. Pitoniak’s characters may sound familiar, but the author takes them in imaginative directions as she explores and expands upon their memories and motives and the moments in which, as they weigh individual sacrifice for greater good, their decisions change the trajectories of their lives. And although the book traffics in espionage-saga tropes—Cold War! Spies! Murder! Clandestine meetings! Secret signals! Hidden drops! The KGB! The CIA! They’re all here!—and Pitoniak ultimately wraps things up perhaps too prettily, it’s fun to pick up the clues and piece together the truth about Lara Caine, Sofie, and those with whom they interact as we toggle between exotic locales—Moscow, Paris, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in addition to Split— and the 1970s and present day.
This lively political thriller mulls love, loyalty, and the rewards of playing the long game.
DIABLO MESA
Preston, Douglas & Lincoln Child Grand Central Publishing (400 pp.) $29.00 | Feb. 15, 2022 978-1-5387-3675-3
Two desiccated corpses aren’t the strangest discoveries made by archaeologists in this third entry of Preston and Child’s unusual crime series. Nora Kelly is summoned to her boss’s office at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute and assigned to investigate the site where an unidentified aircraft, perhaps a UFO, supposedly crashed in 1947. She believes that claims of an alien space landing near Roswell are “wacko.” But billionaire Lucas Tappan has provided a generous grant to the institute, and he specifically wants Nora to lead the expedition because of her reputation. She declines and is fired. So Tappan comes to her directly. But “I can’t put digging up UFOs on my resume,” she tells Skip, her less-skeptical brother. “It’s too weird.” Tappan wears her down and hires them both. Reluctantly she takes a team to the area, where they uncover a pair of corpses buried in New Mexico’s high desert. They notify the police, and FBI agent Corrie Swanson takes on the case because they’re on federal land. But the depression in the sand suggests that the vehicle—a flying saucer, maybe?—had struck the ground at a low angle and skipped repeatedly, like a flat rock across a pond. When they come to a possible final resting place, the archaeologists start digging. Just as they are about to make a shocking discovery, armed men stop them. Whatever is under a
couple of meters of earth is a secret the government has closely guarded since the ’40s, and these dudes demonstrate that they will kill intruders on the spot. Kelly and Swanson aren’t friends, but they’ve worked well together ever since they debuted in Old Bones (2019), and they are smart, strong, and appealing protagonists. The story has tension, mystery, murder, and enough romance to give Kelly “a powerful glow, a whole-body tingle.”
Down-to-earth action tackles an otherworldly mystery in this devilishly plausible yarn.
RAMSES THE DAMNED The Reign of Osiris
Rice, Anne & Christopher Rice Anchor (320 pp.) $14.49 paper | Feb. 1, 2022 978-1-101-97033-1
In the wrap-up to his trilogy, Ramses the Damned is part of a band of immortals with an important mission. As readers of the preceding installments—The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989) and Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (2017)—will know, the one-time Egyptian pharaoh is now going by Reginald Ramsey and is married to Julie Stratford, the daughter of a dead Egyptologist. The two are among the recipients of a letter from an immortal queen named Bektaten, warning them to resist the urge to get involved in the great war which is about to engulf the planet and inviting them to come hang out at her manor in England if they need a refuge. The group of people who receive the letter has significant overlap with those on a hit list carried by Russian assassins, each of whom has been equipped with an amber gem that brings statues to life, after which they can be controlled like avatars in a video game. When Ramsey and Julie are attacked, he has a vague, millenniaold memory of seeing the stone at one of his pharaonic initiation ceremonies—but feels a little awkward about bringing it up since he was tripping at the time. In any case, after the first three assassination attempts are foiled (that’s immortality for you), everybody does indeed head to the manor to plan next steps. In addition to offering what sounds like an orgasmic experience of healing when stabbed or shot, immortality has many other benefits. The immortals have vast appetites for food and sex and can eat constantly with no ill results. Since the authors are mother and son, the seeming paucity of sex scenes is probably for the best. We get a brief three-way including Cleopatra, her young British lover, and an American novelist who receives and experiences Cleopatra’s emotions “like a symphony across a telephone line.” The other one involves the male lover of the dead Egyptologist, who is not quite himself when restored to life from his coffin but is more fully revived by a hand job.
