Two Graves

September 24, 2012
Preston and Child’s high-adrenaline 12th thriller featuring maverick FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast wraps up the trilogy that began with 2010’s Fever Dream and continued with 2011’s Cold Vengeance with a bang. Just as Pendergast is reunited one evening in Manhattan’s Central Park with his beloved wife, Helen, who he thought died 12 years earlier, Helen falls victim to a gang of well-organized kidnappers. Despite Pendergast’s impressive combination of brains and brawn as well as network of helpers, his efforts to rescue Helen don’t play out as he anticipated. Meanwhile, a serial murderer dubbed the Hotel Killer has been targeting guests of Manhattan hotels, mutilating his victims and leaving behind a piece of his own body (e.g., a finger, an ear lobe) to taunt the NYPD. Given the growing cast of characters and their complex backstories, those already familiar with the bestselling authors’ fictional world will most enjoy this intelligent suspense novel. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.

March 25, 2013
This new Preston and Child collaboration brings their Helen Trilogy to a slam-bang, breathless close, with their astonishingly resourceful hero, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, single-handedly storming a Nazi stronghold in a South American jungle in his search for his wife's murderer. It's the culmination of a panoply of wildly improbable events. But that's what readers of the series have come to cherish, along with noble heroes and despicable, seemingly unstoppable villainsâe.g. sociopaths, science-bred to Aryan perfection. Rene Auberjonois has narrated enough of these thrillers to have developed not just the perfect vocal match for the erudite, stern-willed Pendergast, but the ability to capture the books' mysterious, gothic, almost phantasmagoric moods. Even better, his long career as a stage and screen performer has provided him with the talent and experience to understand that, sometimes, when action and emotions are pushed to extremes, it's wiser to underplay the scene. A Grand Central hardcover.