GRAVE EXPECTATIONS
By DAVID MONEY
Staff Writer
Unless you have memorized every word in the English language, it would be helpful to keep a dictionary handy while reading Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's latest thriller "Cemetery Dance."
The writers don't truncheon readers with high-end words, but one's vocabulary accretes.
With that aside, "Dance" is a tingling tale of murder, cultism, vigilantism, greed, DNA investigations and a roaming monster tossed in the mix just to really horrify things.
The writers bring back the Rolls Royce-riding FBI special agent A.X.L. Pendergast to help New York police Lt. Vincent D'Agosta solve a series of murders and attacks that have New York City ready to explode.
What they uncover makes for one spooky read. But such a wonderfully scripted one. See how the writers describe the place where the strange cult lives. "The Ville rose up ahead . . . it looked dark and crooked, wreathed in shadow: a haphazard jumble of steeples and roofs like some nightmare village of Dr. Seuss."
Or the description of Pendergast's great-aunt Cornelia: "The old lady was dressed with Victorian severity. . . . A remarkably seamed face, alive with malice . . . A pair of small black eyes, which somehow reminded D'Agosta of the beady eyes of a snake . . .
While this tale is a gruesome one, it does have its lighter moments. There is a bit of romance between D'Agosta and one of the female officers. There is also comic relief in the characters of Maurice Lille, a mausoleum employee, and Monsieur Bertin, a longtime friend of Pendergast.
This is the authors' ninth visit to the Pendergast crime-solving well, but it likely will not be the last. "Dance" is already on the New York Times best-sellers list. A place familiar to the Pendergast character having appeared there in other Child and Preston novels such as "Relic," Reliquary" and "Dance of Death."
"Cemetery Dance," by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Grand Central, 435 pages,
$26.99, hardcover