Reliquary - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Blurb from the Authors Website

How to write a sequel that could follow Relic, one of the most successful techno-thrillers ever written? That was the problem facing Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child when they agreed to write Reliquary. What setting could top the New York Museum of Natural History?
That was when Preston and Child realized there was only one solution. And that was to follow the Museum Beast itself. And that way led underground. Deep underground...
Hidden beneath Manhattan is a warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries, mostly forgotten by those who walk the streets above. There lies the ultimate secret of the Museum Beast...

When two grotesquely deformed skeletons are found deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid the investigation. Margo must once again team up with police lieutenant D'Agosta and FBI agent Pendergast, as well as the brilliant Dr. Frock, to try and solve the puzzle. The trail soon leads deep underground, where they will face the awakening of a slumbering nightmare.

My Review

As I’m sure you can tell from the blurb this book is a sequel to Relic and the second book in a series of books involving Special Agent Prendergast.

I enjoyed this book almost as much as the first one. My only quibble with this was the beginning was just a little slow. It took me almost a week to get through the first 1/3 of the book and then 2 days to finish it. In Relic there was plenty of suspense beginning to end. In Reliquary the first 150 pages is made up all most entirely of investigations by police officers, political bickering, scientific experiments and lots remembering going on. There were only a couple of scenes with the monster(s) and these were usually only 1 or 2 pages long. Once this book got going though holy moly was it a quick read.

One of the main reasons I liked the first book so much was the characters and this book was no different. A lot of the time with thriller/suspense type novels so much effort is spent on the action that I find the characters lacking. Not so with Preston and Child. These are really good, well written characters. They are all multi layered and well developed and you find yourself really caring about the good guys and rooting for the bad guys to get their just desserts. Even the characters who are only present for a small part of the story are wonderfully drawn.

Agent Prendergast is still my favourite character out of the books and I was disappointed that he didn’t have a larger part to play in it.

The style of this book really works for me as well. For the most part (there are some exceptions) the book is divided up into fairly big chapters and each chapter is a different character in a different place and the endings are almost always left on a cliffhanger. I find cliffhangers effective anyways but you when you have to get through three or four chapters with different characters all being with cliffhangers before you can find out what happened in the first chapter you read… well it makes it very difficult to put down the book and finally get to sleep! Unless of course the battery in your book light dies and your too freaked out to go downstairs and find a new one J.

Overall if you liked the first book you will most likely enjoy this one as well. If you haven’t read the first one I would definitely start there. They do go over a lot of the info from the first book in the second so you wouldn’t be totally lost but I think you would lose a lot of what makes these characters so special.