Are you wiped out after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday preparations, shopping, and deals? Relax with a few books from my Thanksgiving post. And don’t forget that today is Giving Tuesday. Lots of charities have matching donation programs today, so check out your favourite cause and see how you can multiply your donation to help out others today.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
Verses for the Dead is book #18 in the Pendergast series by Preston & Child. If you have read any of the rest of the series, you know that Agent Pendergast (FBI) prefers to work on his own, but in this case he is paired up with a junior agent to “assist” him (ie. spy on him and report any rogue behaviour to their boss.) A serial killer is on the loose, and Pendergast is the only one who seems to have any idea how to pursue the investigation.
As always, Preston & Child bring a good thriller to publication, with plenty of interesting characters and a truly evil serial killer operating behind the scenes. I will say, though, that there was some stuff in the behavioural profiling explained by a character in the book that is way off base. But to be fair I don’t know yet whether that is because the character was intentionally misleading the agents, whether it was a red herring planted by the authors, or if it really was just a mistake. I’ll know in a few more days!
I noticed that you can pick up the first four chapters of this book for free, if you want to check it out.
Pickett’s fingers tightened on the sheet as Pendergast reached for it. “There’s just one thing. You’ll be working with a partner.”
Preston & Child, Verses for the Dead
After an overhaul of leadership at the FBI’s New York field office, A. X. L. Pendergast is abruptly forced to accept an unthinkable condition of continued employment: the famously rogue agent must now work with a partner.
Pendergast and his new colleague, junior agent Coldmoon, are assigned to investigate a rash of killings in Miami Beach, where a bloodthirsty psychopath is cutting out the hearts of his victims and leaving them with cryptic handwritten letters at local gravestones. The graves are unconnected save in one bizarre way: all belong to women who committed suicide.
But the seeming lack of connection between the old suicides and the new murders is soon the least of Pendergast’s worries. Because as he digs deeper, he realizes the brutal new crimes may be just the tip of the iceberg: a conspiracy of death that reaches back decades.
