The Cabinet of Curiosities

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have taken us from a pirate's island fortress (Riptide) to the ancient lost city of the Anasazi Indians (Thunderhead) to the edge of the world and beyond (The Ice Limit). Now they return to the famous New York Museum of Natural History, the setting for their classic bestseller, The Relic. For the museum cloaks a terrifying secret of the past, not out of the Amazonian jungles or the depths of Africa, but from New York City itself...

In nineteenth-century New York, the public flocked to collections of strange and grotesque oddities called "cabinets of curiosities." Now, in lower Manhattan, a modern apartment tower is slated to rise on the site of one of the old cabinets. But when the excavators break into a basement, they uncover a charnel pit of horror: the remains of thirty-six people murdered and gruesomely dismembered over 130 years ago by an unknown serial killer.

In the aftermath, Museum archaeologist Nora Kelly is visited by an enigmatic, silver-eyed FBI agent who is obsessed with the mystery of the bodies. Together, Special Agent Pendergast and Nora Kelly embark on an investigation that will take them from the gleaming skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan to the crumbling archives of the Museum, from a mass grave under a Chinatown brownstone to a house of abominations on Riverside Drive. Their search unearths the faint whisper of a mysterious doctor who once roamed the city...a genius who carried out medical experiments on living human beings. But just as Nora and Pendergast begin to unravel the clues to the century-old killings, a fresh spree of murder and surgical mutilation erupts around them...and New York City is awash in terror.

Fast-paced and filled with the brilliant scientific details that have become the trademark of Preston/Child novels, The Cabinet of Curiosities presents readers with the duo's most delicious conundrum — and most gripping read — to date.

"[R]ichly entertaining....Featuring fabulous locales, colorful characters, pointed riffs on city and museum politics, cool forensic and paleontological speculation and several gripping set pieces including an extended white-knuckle climax, this a great beach novel, at times gruesome, always fun: Preston-Child at the top of their game." Publishers Weekly

"[A]bsolutely terrific....This adventure has all the elements of the perfect summer read....Authors Preston and Child have been hot since Relic, and here they score another big winner." Library Journal

"This is one of [the authors'] best, primarily because it features Pendergast in a leading role; he's the most interesting character the pair has created....This [novel] doesn't contain the heavy doses of fantasy readers have come to expect from the duo, but its mix of suspense and archaeology is sure to please the thriller crowd." David Pitt, Booklist

In downtown Manhattan, a gruesome discovery has just been made — an underground charnel house containing the bones of dozens of murder victims. Research reveals that a serial killer was at work in New York's notorious Five Points neighborhood in the 1880s, bent on prolonging his lifespan by any means. When a newspaper story on the old murders appears to ignite a new series of horrifyingly similar killings, panic overtakes New York City. Now, FBI agent Pendergast, journalist Bill Smithback, and archaeologist Nora Kelly join forces to protect themselves from a vicious killer...before they become the next victims.

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered.

Inside are thirty-six bodies--all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago.

While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city.

The nightmare has begun.

Again.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are the coauthors of the bestselling novels The Relic, Mount Dragon, Reliquary, and Riptide.

Douglas Preston worked for the American Museum of Natural History, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and in 1989 retraced Coronado's thousand-mile odyssey on horseback.

Lincoln Child is a former book editor at St. Martin's Press and has published numerous short-story anthologies.