Bloodless by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Following on directly from the end of Verses for the Dead, Special Agent A X L Pendergast, his ward Constance, and his FBI partner, Agent Coldmoon, are sent to Savannah to investigate a series of strange murders that suggest there’s a vampire on the loose in Georgia.

I’ve been a fan of Preston and Child’s novels since I read their first Pendergast book, Relic, and I particularly like when they blend thrillers with science fiction and horror. My favorite Pendergast stories are where the authors take the most fantastical elements of the story and roll with it, rather than keeping to a more mundane solution to the mystery.

Bloodless is their most science fiction Pendergast novel to date. I had constructed such a bizarre solution to the mystery in order to explain how a human could have committed the various murders that I was surprised when it turned out to be a more straight forward, although fantastical, solution.

Pendergast and Constance have changed a lot from their original characters, but I liked that they were more realistic in this novel than in the last few books.

Agent Coldmoon continues to be a fun character, and I like his dynamic with Pendergast and Constance.

The climax of the novel is fun and exciting, even though certain aspects of how the final battle went down didn’t make sense to me and seemed to contradict the in world rules.

I found the ending highly emotional, even though it also didn’t make sense going by the logic of the circumstances described in the novel. I look forward to reading what comes next, and following Pendergast and Constance into even more bizarre scenarios.

Despite some inconsistencies and the lack of lush descriptive writing that is usually a trademark of these authors, I enjoyed this book from beginning to end and it is one of my favorite of Pendergast’s outings.

I award Bloodless…

---

Click on the book names to read my reviews of some of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s other novels: The Scorpion’s Tail, Crooked River and Verses for the Dead.