Bloodless

June 28, 2021
A prologue to Preston and Child’s disappointing 20th thriller featuring FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast (after 2020’s Crooked River) depicts the notorious unsolved 1971 plane hijacking by D.B. Cooper in the Pacific Northwest. In the present, Pendergast and his partner, Armstrong Coldmoon, have been dispatched to Georgia to investigate several baffling murders. As the victims were drained of blood through one of their multiple stab wounds, the killer is dubbed the Savannah Vampire. Pressure to close the case quickly comes from a boorish U.S. senator, who fears bad press about the crimes will imperil his reelection bid. Pendergast’s ward, Constance Greene, assists by befriending a reclusive hotel owner rumored to have prolonged her life by drinking human blood. How the plane hijacking ties in with the current action will surprise readers, but the lack of real scares, an outlandish solution to the central mystery, and a lead who’s more action hero than Sherlockian sleuth render this a lesser series entry. X-Files fans will best appreciate this one. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.

July 1, 2021
Following pretty much immediately after the conclusion of Crooked River (2020), the new Pendergast novel finds the FBI Special Agent winging his way to Georgia, where human bodies have been found drained of their blood. A local legend concerning a vampire has got some people spooked, but Pendergast, always the pragmatist, believes there is a less supernatural explanation. But what's really got him intrigued is the apparent connection between these modern-day murders and the 1971 airplane hijacking famously perpetrated by a man known only as D. B. Cooper. It will come as no surprise to fans of the long-running Pendergast series (Relic, the first novel in which he appeared, was published in 1995) that this novel is exquisitely written and beautifully plotted, and that Pendergast continues to be one of the most interesting characters in the thriller genre. Preston and Child each have thriving solo writing careers, but when they team up, great things happen.

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Starred review from July 1, 2021
FBI Special Agent Pendergast and his cohorts face great peril as they try to find out what's bleeding a Georgia city dry. In 1971, the mysterious hijacker D.B. Cooper parachutes from a commercial airliner with a bundle of cash in the remote northwest and is never heard from again. A half-century later, Aloysius X.L. Pendergast and colleague Armstrong Coldmoon are sent to Savannah, Georgia, to investigate a "most peculiar incident": a body has washed ashore with nary a drop of blood left in the corpse. A reader's first thought might be What's that got to do with an old hijacking? Leave it to the imaginations of Preston and Child to eventually make the delightfully strange connection. Pendergast looks every bit the stereotypical undertaker, not at all fitting the FBI mold. He brings along his adult "ward," Constance Greene, who brings her stiletto everywhere she goes. Meanwhile, bloodless bodies accumulate. Who could possibly be committing these frightful atrocities? And why only in Savannah? That one's easy: because it's a spooky old city "with its gnarled trees and crooked houses," and everything about the plot is spooky and surreal. A film crew prepares to create a phony documentary in a graveyard using smoke machines and showing callous disregard for the dead. A scheming U.S. senator frets that the rapid escalation in ghastly violence will hurt his reelection prospects, and he pressures the FBI for a rapid solution. Unfortunately, the killer makes an unholy mess of the city, sucking out its Southern charm along with plenty of blood. He--she--let's settle on it--turns the tale into one of more horror than crime. Without Pendergast's perspicacity, Coldmoon's competence, and Constance's cojones (figuratively, of course), that old city of mint juleps would be a smoking hole in the ground. And readers wouldn't learn about D.B. Cooper's fate. The authors' imaginations run unfettered as they travel to unearthly locales, but in the end it comes down to beleaguered Savannah. All of Pendergast's adventures are weird and wonderful fun, and this is no exception.

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