Fever Dream by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Fever Dream is the 10^th installment of Preston and Child’s series featuring the handsome, cultured, and eccentric protagonist, Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI.  This book reveals a personal side to Aloysius Xingu L. Pendergast (yup, that’s his given name) so is an excellent opportunity for the authors to develop their signature character.

Pendergast is examining his gun collection at his family mansion in Louisiana when he discovers his former wife’s rifle had last fired a blank.  Helen had last fired that rifle twelve years earlier on safari in Africa as a lion attacked and mauled her to death.  Pendergast surmises someone else had replaced Helen’s live ammunition with blanks thus setting up her demise.  He is compelled to investigate Helen’s murder and solicits help from longtime friend and collaborator, NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta.  Together they retrace Helen’s activities prior to her death.

Apparently, Helen had become secretly obsessed with the famed naturalist and painter John James Audubon.  She had spent hours searching for a missing painting, Audubon’s final work before his death, entitled Black Frame.  She had come to believe Audubon had experienced some creative transformation before doing this painting and she was on track to discover the cause of this transformation.  As Pendergast and D’Agosta reconstruct Helen’s findings, they discover secret and deadly medical research perpetrated by a pharmaceutical research company located deep in the Mississippi bayou.  Unraveling the connection of this illicit activity in the bayou with Helen’s gruesome death in Africa twelve years earlier, places Pendergast and D’Agosta squarely in the murderer’s sights.


Preston and Child tell a good story.  They build a strong plot and masterfully peel the onion until all is revealed.  While their prose is eloquent, their vocabulary is a bit of a challenge for me. Perhaps that is in keeping with their highly educated, well cultured lead character, A.X.L. Pendergast… but I find myself looking up two or three words in every chapter.  That’s kind of annoying when the words they chose don’t really blend well into the story… but thanks for the vocab lesson.  My greatest problem with the book, however, is that I just don’t relate to the lead character, Pendergast.  We are constantly reminded how handsome, cultured, and intelligent he is when to me he comes off as pompous, reclusive, and self-centered… not your typical hero.  I think I’ve read the last of Preston and Child.