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Douglas Preston

Author of Relic

114+ Works 76,986 Members 2,437 Reviews 177 Favorited

About the Author

Douglas Jerome Preston was born on May 20, 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. in English literature from Pomona College in 1978. His career began at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked as an editor and writer from 1978 to 1985. He also was a lecturer in English show more at Princeton University. He became a full-time writer of both fiction and nonfiction books in 1986. Many of his fiction works are co-written with Lincoln Child including Relic, Riptide, Thunderhead, The Wheel of Darkness, Cemetery Dance, and Gideon's Corpse. His nonfiction works include Dinosaurs in the Attic; Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado; Talking to the Ground; and The Royal Road. He has written for numerous magazines including The New Yorker; Natural History; Harper's; Smithsonian; National Geographic; and Travel and Leisure. He became a New York Times Best Selling author with his titles Two Graves and Crimson Shores which he co-wrote with Lincoln Child, and his titles White Fire, The Lost Island Blue Labyrinth and The Lost City of the Monkey God. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:

This author is Douglas Preston. DO NOT COMBINE THIS PAGE WITH ANY JOINT PAGES OF DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are two different people, who have written books collaboratively and separately. Their author pages should not be combined with each other, or with any of the variants using both their names. Please see "Who Should/Shouldn't Get combined" on the Author wiki page. Thank you.

Image credit: Uncredited photo at literati.net

Series

Works by Douglas Preston

Relic (1995) 5,450 copies, 154 reviews
The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002) 4,164 copies, 115 reviews
Reliquary (1997) 3,727 copies, 84 reviews
The Book of the Dead (2006) 3,662 copies, 81 reviews
Brimstone (2004) 3,519 copies, 69 reviews
The Wheel Of Darkness (2007) 3,242 copies, 76 reviews
Dance of Death (2005) 3,173 copies, 66 reviews
Still Life with Crows (2003) 3,160 copies, 87 reviews
The Monster of Florence (2008) 2,721 copies, 110 reviews
Cemetery Dance (2009) 2,472 copies, 84 reviews
Thunderhead (1999) 2,339 copies, 46 reviews
Fever Dream (2010) 2,330 copies, 86 reviews
Riptide (1998) 2,234 copies, 46 reviews
Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005) 2,162 copies, 59 reviews
The Codex (2003) 2,145 copies, 44 reviews
The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story (2017) 2,071 copies, 99 reviews
The Ice Limit (2000) 2,031 copies, 40 reviews
Mount Dragon (1996) 1,789 copies, 20 reviews
Blasphemy (2008) 1,699 copies, 52 reviews
Cold Vengeance (2011) 1,656 copies, 73 reviews
Two Graves (2012) 1,590 copies, 66 reviews
White Fire (2013) 1,512 copies, 79 reviews
Gideon's Sword (2011) — Author — 1,494 copies, 95 reviews
Impact (2010) 1,392 copies, 53 reviews
Blue Labyrinth (2014) 1,317 copies, 73 reviews
Crimson Shore (2015) 1,166 copies, 57 reviews
The Obsidian Chamber (2016) 977 copies, 46 reviews
Gideon's Corpse (2012) — Author — 956 copies, 42 reviews
City of Endless Night (2018) 943 copies, 40 reviews
Old Bones (2019) 904 copies, 53 reviews
The Lost Island (2014) 882 copies, 33 reviews
Verses for the Dead (2018) 821 copies, 29 reviews
Crooked River (2020) 685 copies, 26 reviews
Bloodless (2021) 650 copies, 23 reviews
Beyond the Ice Limit (2016) 649 copies, 30 reviews
The Scorpion's Tail (2021) 609 copies, 22 reviews
The Pharoah Key (2018) 548 copies, 16 reviews
The Kraken Project (2014) 542 copies, 29 reviews
The Cabinet of Dr. Leng (2023) 458 copies, 19 reviews
Diablo Mesa (2022) 438 copies, 16 reviews
Dead Mountain (2023) — Author — 326 copies, 6 reviews
Extraction (2012) 292 copies, 14 reviews
Extinction (2024) 288 copies, 18 reviews
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel (2022) — Editor; Contributor — 288 copies, 11 reviews
Jennie (1994) 221 copies, 6 reviews
Angel of Vengeance (2024) 187 copies, 8 reviews
Talking to the Ground (1995) 104 copies, 3 reviews
The Strange Case of Monsieur Bertin (2019) 15 copies, 1 review
Riptide [abridged audiobook] (1998) — Author — 4 copies
Loputtoman yön kaupunki (2024) 3 copies
L'antre du diable (2022) 2 copies
O v℗irus do apocalipse (2013) 2 copies
Badlands 1 copy
Desperation 1 copy
Strangers 1 copy
Il fiume del male (2023) 1 copy
La costa cremisi (2016) 1 copy
Nel fuoco 1 copy
A sötétség kereke (2008) 1 copy

Associated Works

Thriller: Stories To Keep You Up All Night (2006) — Contributor — 781 copies, 13 reviews
FaceOff (2014) — Contributor — 522 copies, 33 reviews
The Big Book of Adventure Stories (2011) — Foreword — 122 copies, 3 reviews
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020 (2021) — Contributor — 117 copies
In Search of Ice Age Americans (2002) — Foreword — 28 copies, 3 reviews
National Geographic Magazine 2015 v228 #4 October (2015) — Contributor — 23 copies
Reader's Digest Select Editions 1998 v06 #240 (1998) — Author — 11 copies

Tagged

adventure (838) Agent Pendergast (646) archaeology (431) audio (186) audiobook (350) crime (535) detective (193) Douglas Preston (242) ebook (611) FBI (256) fiction (4,419) goodreads (150) hardcover (266) history (208) horror (1,181) Italy (230) Kindle (399) library (155) murder (382) mystery (3,137) mystery-thriller (268) New York (291) New York City (218) non-fiction (616) novel (254) own (314) paperback (210) Pendergast (1,624) Pendergast series (233) Preston & Child (371) read (836) science fiction (596) serial killer (203) series (609) supernatural (181) suspense (1,274) thriller (4,076) to-read (2,807) true crime (264) unread (242)

Common Knowledge

Legal name
Preston, Douglas J.
Birthdate
1956-05-26
Gender
male
Nationality
USA
Birthplace
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Places of residence
Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA
New York, New York, USA
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Round Pond, Maine, USA
Education
Pomona College
Cambridge School of Weston
Occupations
editor
writer
manager of publications
professor
research associate
School of American Research (Boardmember)
Relationships
Preston, Richard (brother)
Dickinson, Emily (Ancestor)
Organizations
American Museum of Natural History
The Atlantic Monthly
Smithsonian
The New Yorker
Laboratory of Anthropology (Santa Fe)
PEN New Mexico
Agent
Eric Simonoff (Janklow & Nesbit Associates)
Matthew Snyder
Short biography
Douglas Preston is the author of thirty-five books, both fiction and nonfiction, twenty-two of which have been New York Times bestsellers, with several reaching the number 1 position. He has worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. His first novel, RELIC, co-authored with Lincoln Child, was made into a movie by Paramount Pictures, which launched the famed Pendergast series of novels. His recent nonfiction book, THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, is also in production as a film. His latest book, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD, tells the true story of the discovery of a prehistoric city in an unexplored valley deep in the Honduran jungle. In addition to books, Preston writes about archaeology and paleontology for the New Yorker, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. He is past co-president of International Thriller Writers and serves on the board of the Authors Guild. He is the recipient of numerous writing awards in the US and Europe, including an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Pomona College.
Disambiguation notice
This author is Douglas Preston. DO NOT COMBINE THIS PAGE WITH ANY JOINT PAGES OF DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are two different people, who have written books collaboratively and separately. Their author pages should not be combined with each other, or with any of the variants using both their names. Please see "Who Should/Shouldn't Get combined" on the Author wiki page. Thank you.

Members

Reviews

An exciting, page turning book set in a remote part of Utah, a young woman named Nora Kelly leads an archaeological expedition to a previously unknown Anasazi site described in a letter written by her archaeologist father sixteen years earlier but mysteriously mailed only recently. In it he describes a lost city of monumental wealth but he hasn’t been heard from since. And his disappearance is part of the mystery. She sets out to rediscover it but runs into much more than she bargained for.

Anyone with even a passing interest in that science, the Anasazi culture, the occult, or just a well written, exciting book should check this one out.
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Flagged
TWaterfall | 45 other reviews | Jan 5, 2025 |
from James:

I'm lukewarm on this title. I've never read Preston before but thought I should since so many people seem to enjoy him. I guess it was about what I expected: mildly entertaining.

I felt like the grand denouement started about 100 pages in and then it just went on and on. Some people like that sort of edge of your seat action, but I just felt exhausted by the end. My other complaint would be that it gets too heavy in the techno-babble. He spent paragraphs explaining some scientific procedure (which probably gets dinged by real folks doing that type of research anyway), when really just a Y follows X explanation would have sufficed.

I didn't even read the little tidbits told from the dinosaur's point of view. I just didn't care. The book is akin to solid B movie. Not one you'd seek out again, but sufficed for its intended purpose: to pass the time.
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Flagged
JamesMikealHill | 58 other reviews | Jan 3, 2025 |
I believe the Covid pandemic is going to provide much fodder for literature, just as the world wars have. It makes sense since these events affected so many and changed life as we knew it.

This book is a series of interconnected stories set in an apartment block in New York City during the pandemic lockdown. I listened to the audiobook and my one regret is that there was no additional information about which author wrote which piece. In all as there was in the printed edition, 36 authors contributed to the book so, obviously, more than one person created each tale. Maybe it doesn't matter but it would just provide a finishing touch.

The residents of the Fernsby Arms gather on the roof of the building each night in order to take part in the nightly ritual of noisemaking to show appreciation for health care workers. They linger on after that outburst, all carefully social distanced, and tell stories. The building's superintendant covertly records the stories and then transcribes them into a scrapbook left behind by her predecessor. Her predecessor kept notes about all the tenants and gave them all nicknames. They are a diverse group so their stories are quite different. Many deal with death and/or ghosts as may be expected given the time they are experiencing. No one seems to have contact with anyone outside the building. The superintendant's father is in a nursing home and she hasn't been able to reach anyone there. A doctor staying in the building while she helps out in the emergency ward of a local hospital (although she's on leave right now) also can't get through. Residents, including the super, hear strange noises in an apartment that is supposed to be vacant. Occasionally, strangers show up on the roof top when the super knows the door to the outside is locked tight. It's all a little spooky but also very interesting. And the ending absolutely threw me for a loop. I didn't see that coming.

The Decameron, a similar book of stories supposedly written by a group of people who fled Florence during the Black Death, is referenced several times. Obviously, this provided a starting point for this collective of writers but they gave it a twenty-first century spin. One obvious difference is that the people in The Decameron left the city whereas these people were the ones left behind when the well-off fled the city.
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Flagged
gypsysmom | 10 other reviews | Dec 28, 2024 |
Misleading Description Yet Excellent Tale. Just Not Anything Really Remotely Like Jurassic Park. Ok, the few things that *are* like Jurassic Park: human hubris leads to "de-extincting" long-extinct plants and creatures. Commentary on modern science baked into the story. Commentary on history baked into the story. Thus ends the things that are like Jurassic Park.

In other words... don't go into this book expecting "Jurassic Park... With Mammoths". This is *NOT* that story. Instead, it is more "murder mystery at a park similar to Jurassic Park". Go into this book with those at least somewhat lower expectations... and this is an awesome book with plenty of wonder, action, thrills, chills... and a few cheeky meta references. (Such as when a character is reading one of his and longtime writing partner Lincoln Child's Pendergast books - a trope many authors use to plug their own books or sometimes friends' books or even just random books the author has read and enjoyed.)

For the story we *do* get here, it is truly well done, a fast paced action thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat and keep you guessing about what will come next.

Very much recommended.
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Flagged
BookAnonJeff | 17 other reviews | Dec 23, 2024 |

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Statistics

Works
114
Also by
28
Members
76,986
Popularity
#159
Rating
3.8
Reviews
2,437
ISBNs
1,801
Languages
23
Favorited
177

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