FORGOTTEN BOOK: THUNDERHEAD

Thunderhead by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child  (1999)

I've been on a Preston & Child kick for most of this year, having read fifteen of their novels thus far.  Thunderhead was their fifth collaboration and their third standalone novel.  It introduces Nora Kelley, a young assistant professor of archaeology at fictional Santa Fe Archaeological Institute, one of the premiere institutes of its kind in the world.  Nora's father Pat was also a talented archaeologist, although one give to quixotic flights of fancy; he went missing sixteen years before while exploring the remote redrock canyons of Southern Utah, leaving Nora's unstable mother to raise Nora and her younger brother, Skip.  Their mother died six months ago, leaving their abandoned family home in ruins and Skip, who had recently earned his degree in physics, to embark on a fast road to alcoholism and despair.  Despite urgings to sell the property, Nora stubbornly hangs onto it and to memories of better times.

Then Nora receives a letter, mailed five days before, written by her father sixteen years ago to her mother.  Where did the letter come from and who mailed it?  In the letter her father tells of finding an ancient Anasazi trail that led to what he was sure was the fabled city of Quivera -- the lost city of gold and the center of the Anasazi civilization.  could this be true?  Had her father found the perhaps mythical city?  And what had happened to him sixteen years before?

Then when Nora was visiting her ancestral home, she was attacked by two beings?/men? covered in fur and acting like wolves but demanding that Nora give them the letter.  The two were dispersed by a neighbor with a shotgun, but Nora was shaken.  Nora's apartment was then apparently entered:  things were not in their usual place and her dog was missing.  Afraid both for her and her brother and determined to find answers about her father's disappearance and the lost city, she sets out to organize an expedition, which was eventually financed by Ernest Goddard, the Chairman of the Board of the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute.

The expedition, to be led by Nora, would include one of the world's leading geochronologists, one of the country's finest physical anthropologists, a high-end ( and expensive) camp manager and cook, an imaginative scient from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (who had altered a satellite's orbit to use image sensing to locate the Anazasi trail), a cowboy wrangler in charge of the needed horses for the expedition, Dr. Goddard's archaeologist daughter (she had to go along -- this one was a deal-breaker), and Bill Smithback, a cocky journalist hire to record the expedition.

The vast area they we headed to was basically unexplored and unknown -- a huge system canyons and desert, prone to dangerous floods and animals.  It would be hard trek.  The lost city -- if it exists and if they find it -- should be hidden in a steep cliff.  Not much is known about the Anasazi, the native Americans who ruled this land a thousand year ago -- their culture, their religion, their form of government, and even their language is a mystery, unsolved even with the many shards and relics they left behind; their civilization suddenly and mysteriously vanished without a trace about 1500 A.D.

To get the answers she wants, Nora has not only to face the harsh physical landscape, the contrarian members of her expedition, and the dangers of flood and landslides, but also whoever -- or whatever -- wants her to fail.  And are these forces trying to protect the fabled city, or are hoping to gain its riches for themselves?  And there's witchcraft and cannibalistic cults, to boot.

An exciting thriller filled with the fascinating lore and history of the Southwest.

Nora Kelly, went on to be featured in a number of Preston-Child books about FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast, and graduated in 2019 to her own series of (thus far) five novels.  (SPOILER ALERT:  In the Pendergast series, she eventually marries Bill Smithback, ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT: only to lose him on their first anniversary; Smithback was also a veteran of the Pendergast series, going back to the first novel, Relic.)

Douglas Preston is a journalist who has written ten nonfiction books, many about science and exploration, and a number of these about the American southwest.  He has published seven novels on his own, including the Wyman Ford series and Jennie, which was made into a Disney film, as well as two novels with his daughter Aletheia.

Lincoln Child is the solo author of eight horror and technothriller novels, including the Jeremy Logan series. Three of his solo novels were New York Times bestsellers.  He was a book editor for St. Martin's Press, leaving the company in 1985 when he began a career as a systems analyst.  Since 1995, he has been a full-time writer.  In the mid- to late-eighties, he published five horror anthologies, including three in the Tales of the Dark series.

Together, the pair have written thirty-seven novels, including 23 in the bestselling Pendergast series, five in the Gideon Crew series. five in the Nora Kelly series, and four standalones, most of which were bestsellers.  Their first collaboration, Relic, was filmed in 1997 as The Relic by Peter Hyams and starred Penelope Miller, Tom Sizemore, Linda Hunt, and James Whitmore -- the film was praised by Siskel and Ebert, although many critics disagreed ("brainless monster mayhem...too predictably derivative," "a bad reworking of elements from Aliens, Species, Jaws, and Predator," and "good novel, bad adaptation." and the film turned out to be box office bomb.

Bottom line:  the Preston & Child books are amazingly addictive and Thunderhead is thunderously so (see what I did there?).