Works by
Douglas Preston
(Writer)

Writing Alone

Fiction

• Blasphemy (2008)
  The world's biggest supercollider, locked in an Arizona mountain, was built to reveal the secrets of the very moment of creation: the Big Bang itself. The Torus is the most expensive machine ever created by humankind, run by the world's most powerful supercomputer. It is the brainchild of Nobel Laureate William North Hazelius. Will the Torus divulge the mysteries of the creation of the universe? Or will it, as some predict, suck the earth into a mini black hole? Or is the Torus a Satanic attempt, as a powerful televangelist decries, to challenge God Almighty on the very throne of Heaven? Twelve scientists under the leadership of Hazelius are sent to the remote mountain to turn it on, and what they discover must be hidden from the world at all costs. Wyman Ford, ex-monk and CIA operative, is tapped to wrest their secret, a secret that will either destroy the world...or save it. The countdown begins...

• Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005)
  A moon rock missing for thirty years. Five buckets of blood-soaked sand found in a New Mexico canyon. A scientist with ambition enough to kill. A monk who will redeem the world. A dark agency with a deadly mission. The greatest scientific discovery of all time. What fire bolt from the galactic dark shattered the Earth eons ago, and now hides in that remote cleft in the southwest U.S. known as ...

  Tyrannosaur Canyon?

  A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil has been unearthed that contains an amazing clue to dinosaur extinction and a battle for it ensues between scientists and a shadowy government agency which is desperate to keep the explosive secret under wraps ... to prevent another mass extinction—this time of the human race.

• The Codex (2003)
  "Greetings from the dead," Maxwell Broadbent declared from the videotape he left behind after his mysterious disappearance. A notorious treasure hunter and tomb robber, Maxwell accumulated a priceless collection of rare art, gems, and artifacts before vanishing completely-- along with all his riches.

  At first, robbery is suspected, but the truth proves far stranger: as a final challenge to his three sons, Maxwell has buried himself and his treasures somewhere in the world, hidden away like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. If his sons wish to claim their inheritance, they must find their father's concealed tomb.

  Furthermore, Maxwell's priceless possessions include a codex-an ancient Mayan manuscript that contains all the lost arts of Mayan herbal medicine, secrets that will revolutionize pharmacology. The codex is worth billions, and one pharmaceutical company CEO has sent mercenaries after it with orders to kill anyone in their way, including the beautiful and enigmatic woman accompanying one of the sons.

  Now the race is on, but the three brothers are not the only ones competing for the treasure. Others soon join the hunt--and some of them will stop at nothing to claim the grave goods.

• Jennie (1994)
  On a research trip to West Africa, Dr. Hugo Archibald of the Boston Museum of Natural History encounters an orphaned baby chimpanzee. Archibald decides to bring the ape, which he named Jennie. Back to Boston and raise her alongside his own two young children.

  Jennie captures the hearts of everyone she encounters. She believes herself to be a human being, and she does almost everything a human child can, from riding a tricycle to fighting with her siblings over television. She soon attracts the attention of a famous primatologist, who decides to include her in an experiment to teach chimpanzees to communicate using American Sign Language. Everything goes well; but what happens when the experiment is over?

  Told from shifting points of view of those closest to Jennie, this bittersweet novel forces us to take a closer look at the species that shares 98 percent of our DNA. The novel confronts the question: what does it really mean to be human?

  Jennie is partly based on the real story of the chimpanzee who inspired Curious George, a chimp who was raised at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1930s. Jennie was made into the award-winning Disney television film, The Jennie Project. It was translated into many languages and became a worldwide best-seller.

• Dinosaurs in the Attic - An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History (1986)
  Dinosaurs in the Attic is the book that brought Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston together. Preston had been writing a column for Natural History magazine when Child, then a rising young editor at St. Martin’s Press, called him up and asked him to write a book about the museum. Dinosaurs in the Attic was the result, written by Douglas Preston and edited by Lincoln Child.

  Later Child suggested they write a thriller set in the Museum, and Relic was the result. Chapters in Dinosaurs in the Attic also inspired other novels, including The Ice Limit and Preston’s solo novel, Jennie.

  The American Museum of Natural History in New York is one of the best-loved museums in the United States. Some four million people come through its doors every year. They marvel at the dinosaur skeletons, the meteorites, the elephants and the gems. And yet less than five percent of the Museum’s collections are on display.

  Beyond the exhibition halls, along seemingly endless corridors, basement rooms, attic vaults and locked cabinets, the Museum houses a veritable stockpile of world records: the biggest elephant tusks, the finest uncut emerald, the world’s smallest beetle, millions of spiders, butterflies, dinosaur bones, whales, diamonds, gold masks, gigantic rubies, thousands of mummies, shrunken heads, and much more.

  How was all this started? Who amassed these fabulous collections, and how? Here you will read the true story of the discovery and transportation of the world’s largest meteorite; the discovery of the first T. Rex; the incredible theft of the Star of India in the biggest jewel heist in history; the bizarre story of the Copper Man; the failed search for the “Arctic Atlantis,” and much more. You will read stories of expeditions to the ends of the earth, true tales of heroism, defeat, discovery, death, madness, and even murder—all in the pursuit of science.

  Dinosaurs in the Attic takes the reader into the deepest sub-basements of the Museum and uncovers hidden treasures never seen by the public. It sheds new light on familiar exhibits and halls, talking to the scientists and curators who created them.

• Cities of Gold - A Journey Across the American Southwest (1992)
  In 1989, Douglas Preston and a friend, Walter Nelson, set out on horseback across one thousand miles of Arizona and New Mexico, retracing the Spanish explorer Coronado’s search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.

  They rode cross country, not following modern roads or trails, sleeping ‘in the saddle’ and enduring some of the harshest deserts and roughest mountain terrain in the United States. Forced to battle extremes of heat and cold, impenetrable mesquite thickets, bad water, rattlesnakes, flash floods and paralyzing drought, they nonetheless found the country awesome in its scale and beauty, with much of it so untouched that it was still recognizable from descriptions in Coronado’s reports.

  At the heart of the book is Preston’s search for a new understanding of that moment when Europeans first fought Indians in the borders of what would become America—and the fatal consequences that resulted. For what Preston finds when he rediscovers the actual ruins of the Seven Cities of Gold—the mud pueblos of the Zuni Indians—is not a tale of the winning of the West, but a frightening story of loss.

  Cities of Gold includes unforgettable portraits of such Indian leaders as Geronimo, Cochise, and the Zuni leader Palowahtiwa, along with stories of gun battles and feuds, and old memories of cattle drives, dust, and the open range.

  In the end, Cities of Gold leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of the Southwest—as it was when Europeans first saw it and as it is today. Since the book’s publication fifteen years ago, it has become a classic.

• Talking to the Ground: One Family's Journey on Horseback Across the Sacred Land of the Navajo (1995)
  In 1992 Doug Preston and his family rode horseback across 400 miles of desert in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. They were retracing the route of the Navajo deity Naayéé' neizghání, the Slayer of Alien Gods, on his quest to restore beauty and balance to the Earth. More than a travelogue, Preston's account of the journey is a tale of two cultures meeting in a sacred land.

• The Royal Road - El Camino Real from Mexico City to Santa Fe (1998) with Christine Preston, Photographer and José Antonio Esquibel  (Genealogical Appendix) -- Winner 1999 Villagrá Award for outstanding publication of the year on New Mexico history
  In 1598, the Spanish Conquistador Juan de Oñate led the first permanent European settlers into what would become the United States. Four hundred years later, Douglas Preston and his wife Christine retraced the two thousand mile road blazed by Oñate between Mexico City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Prestons journeyed by car, by horseback, and on foot, following the entire length of the trail. In one unforgettable experience, they crossed the dreaded Jornada del Muerto desert on horseback, becoming the first travelers in the 20th century to do so. The Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert was the most dangerous portion of the trail, where Oñate and his settlers nearly died of thirst.

  Christine Preston’s photographs, made with a 4 x 5 view camera, show wild places that have hardly changed over the centuries as well as churches, ruins, villages, and modern cityscapes in Mexico and the United States. Douglas Preston’s text tells the story of one of the most ancient human trails in North America, which began twelve thousand years ago as a series of Indian footpaths following the migratory routes of mastondons. It became the most important prehistoric trade route in western North America, over which farming, corn, beans and pottery first came into the Southwest. He tells the story of Oñate and the later travelers on the trail, and chronicles his own exploration of the route. The book creates a fascinating and indelible portrait of New Mexico, the founding of Santa Fe, and the settlement of the Southwest.

Writing with Lincoln Child

Pendergast Novels

• Relic (1994) with Lincoln Child
  Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human...
  
  But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.
  
  Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who--or what--is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?
  Movie

• Reliquary (1997) with Lincoln Child
  Sequel to Relic
  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.

• The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002) with Lincoln Child
  In the 19th century, New Yorkers 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. Yet 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, FBI Special Agent Pendergast and museum archaeologist Nora Kelly embark on an investigation that unearths the faint whisper of a mysterious doctor who once roamed the city, carrying 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.

• Still Life with Crows (2003) with Lincoln Child
  From the New York Times bestselling duo Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child comes their latest--and spookiest--yet: a small town in Kansas, a series of grisly murders, and the depraved and hidden evil within. Enter the new American Gothic...
  
  Medicine Creek, Kansas. In a town where nothing changes, where Main Street is a two-block stretch of old and dusty businesses, a peculiar and ghastly murder has taken place, the body mutilated and placed carefully in an elaborate tableau in the middle of the endless cornfields. Now cool-eyed and smooth FBI Agent Pendergast arrives to discover a community he must turn inside out to find the killer who can only be one of them...

• The Wheel of Darkness (2007) with Lincoln Child
  FBI Special Agent Pendergast is taking a break from work to take Constance on a whirlwind Grand Tour, hoping to give her closure and a sense of the world that she's missed. They head to Tibet, where Pendergast intensively trained in martial arts and spiritual studies. At a remote monastery, they learn that a rare and dangerous artifact the monks have been guarding for generations has been mysteriously stolen. As a favor, Pendergast agrees to track and recover the relic. A twisting trail of bloodshed leads Pendergast and Constance to the maiden voyage of the Britannia, the world's largest and most luxurious ocean liner---and to an Atlantic crossing fraught with terror.

• Cemetery Dance (Summer 2009 release)

Diogenes Trilogy

1. Brimstone (2004) with Lincoln Child
   Behind the gates of a fabulous Hamptons estate, FBI Special Agent Pendergast comes upon the carnage of a gruesome crime: one that recalls the legendary horrors that befall those who make a Faustian pact with the devil. Surrounded by the choking stench of brimstone, the smoldering remains of art critic Jeremy Grove are found in a locked, barricaded attic next to a hoofprint singed into the floorboards.
   
   Unable to resist a case that defies all but supernatural logic, Pendergast reunites with police officers Vincent D'Agosta (Relic) and Laura Hayward (Reliquary) to search for a more earthly explanation. But their investigation soon takes them from the luxury estates of Long Island and penthouses of New York City to the crumbling, legend-shrouded castles of the Italian countryside, where thirty years ago four men conjured up something unspeakable. . .

2. Dance of Death (2005) with Lincoln Child
   Praised as a “ruthless descendant of Holmes” (Publishers Weekly), Agent Pendergast has become one of crime fiction’s most endearing characters. His greatest enemy is one who has stalked him all of his life, his cunning and diabolical brother Diogenes. And Diogenes has thrown down the gauntlet.
   
   Now, several of the people closest to Pendergast are viciously murdered, and Pendergast is framed for the deeds. On the run from federal authorities, with only the help of his old friend NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, Pendergast must stop his brother. But how can he stop a man that is his intellectual equal--one 9who has had 20 years to plan the world’s most horrendous crime?

3. The Book of the Dead (2006) with Lincoln Child
   The New York Museum of Natural History receives their pilfered gem collection back...ground down to dust. Diogenes, the psychotic killer who stole them in Dance of Death, is throwing down the gauntlet to both the city and to his brother, FBI Agent Pendergast, who is currently incarcerated in a maximum security prison.
   
   To quell the PR nightmare of the gem fiasco, the museum decides to reopen the Tomb of Senef. An astounding Egyptian temple, it was a popular museum exhibit until the 1930s, when it was quietly closed. But when the tomb is unsealed in preparation for its gala reopening, the killings--and whispers of an ancient curse--begin again. And the catastrophic opening itself sets the stage for the final battle between the two brothers: an epic clash from which only one will emerge alive.

Other Novels

• The Monster of Florence (2008) with Mario Spezi
  In the nonfiction tradition of John Berendt ("Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") and Erik Larson ("The Devil in the White City"), New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston presents a gripping account of crime and punishment in the lush hills surrounding Florence, Italy.
  In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14^th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more. This is the true story of their search for--and identification of--the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy's grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself. Like one of Preston's thrillers, The Monster Of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide-and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta.

• Ice Ship (2002) with Lincoln Child

• The Ice Limit (2000) with Lincoln Child with Lincoln Child
  On a desolate island off the southern coast of Chile, an incredible discovery is made: a gigantic meteorite, the largest ever found, entombed in the earth for millions of years.
  
  Half a world away, billionaire entrepreneur Palmer Lloyd decides he must have it as the centerpiece of his grandiose new museum. He is willing to pay any price--in dollars and in lives. Getting it back to New York poses a particular challenge: It will be the heaviest object ever moved by humankind.
  
  Fueled by Lloyd’s money, an audacious expedition takes shape. Disguising a state-of-the-art ship as a rusted freighter, the expedition secretly heads southward with a fail-safe plan to steal the meteorite from Chile. Leading the group is an inscrutable engineer hired by Lloyd, and a world-famous meteorite hunter whose career was shattered by a controversial theory.
  
  Soon, along the icy rim of Antarctica, in the grip of a frozen hell, the adventurers are confronted with a terrifying enigma about the origin--and nature--of the meteorite. It is a mystery they must solve--if they are to escape with their lives.

• Thunderhead (1999) with Lincoln Child
  Archaeologist Nora Kelly is adrift in her career and her personal life when a violent, inexplicable incident leaves her in possession of a mysterious letter.
  
  Written sixteen years before by her father, who vanished without a trace in the remote desert, the letter points to a mythical place hidden in the redrock canyon country of southwestern Utah: Quivira, a city of gold and wonder, the lost city of the Anasazi Indians.
  
  Convinced that her father found Quivira before he disappeared, Nora puts together an expedition. Supported by the head of a well-funded archaeological institute, Nora will take a team up Lake Powell to the mouth of Serpentine Canyon.
  
  What lies ahead in the harsh labyrinth of canyons and slickrock desert is more than she could ever have expected. It is the answer to both her greatest hopes and her deepest nightmares. For hidden in the shadows of the sunbaked cliffs are untold treasures; the answer to the greatest riddle of American archaeology--and implacable, suffocating death.
  
  From the colossal fury of a savage desert storm to the sunlight penetrating a mass grave for the first time in a thousand years, THUNDERHEAD is a tale for anyone who has ever searched for clues to the past. In the masterful hands of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, THUNDERHEAD becomes an epic tale of discovery, human deceit, and a desperate struggle for survival in a place that has guarded its extraordinary secret for centuries--and will not let go without a devastating fight.

• Riptide (1998) with Lincoln Child
  For generations, treasure hunters have tried to unlock the deadly puzzle known as the Water Pit: a labyrinth of shafts and tunnels that honeycomb the heart of a small island off the coast of Maine. Reputed to be the hiding place of pirate treasure, the Water Pit possesses an inexplicable ability to kill those who venture into it, from professionals to innocent explorers.
  
  But now one man has made a startling discovery: the Water Pit is actually a carefully designed fortress, conceived for pirates by a renowned seventeenth-century architect who hid his plans in code. Unlocking the code will break the curse of the Water Pit. Or will it?
  
  The most comprehensive, high-tech expedition ever assembled has come to Maine and to Dr. Malin Hatch, owner of the island. While the treasure hunters have their reasons for mounting this assault--$2 billion in gold--Hatch has his own motives to join them. For Hatch, whose brother died on Ragged Island thirty years before, the only escape from the curse is through the black swirling waters and bloodstained chambers of the Pit.
  
  With more computing power than a small university, the recovery team slowly chips away at the mystery. But as the seekers try to conquer the Pit, men begin to die. And all the while, the last, secret chamber of the Pit waits to unleash the most lethal mystery of all...

• Mount Dragon (1996) with Lincoln Child
  Before there was the Ebola scare, before there was the recent hand-wringing over the vast stockpiles of biological weapons, Mount Dragon posed the question: what about genetic engineering gone wrong?
  
  If rogue viruses can cause devastation and widespread panic, what about viruses engineered--deliberately or accidentally--to be much worse than anything in nature? Imagine: something as deadly as cancer, but as contagious as the flu. Mount Dragon imagines this--and more.
  
  Mount Dragon: an enigmatic research complex hidden in the vast desert of New Mexico. Guy Carson and Susana Cabeza de Vaca have come to Mount Dragon to work shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet. Led by visionary genius Brent Scopes, their secret goal is a medical breakthrough that promises to bring incalculable benefits to the human race. But while Scopes believes he is leading the way to a new world order, he may in fact be opening the door to mass human extinction. And when Guy and Susana attempt to stop him they find themselves locked in a frightening battle with Scopes, his henchmen, and the apocalyptic nightmare that science has unleashed...

See also:

• Ribbons of Time (2006) with Walter W. Nelson, Photographer
  Five years ago, the well-known Texas photographer Walter W. Nelson asked Douglas Preston to join him on an unusual adventure: to explore a virtually unknown canyon in the Big Bend of Texas and produce a book about it. Their exploration has resulted in Ribbons of Time, a magnificent volume of photographs by Nelson, with text by Preston, which will be published in a very small (but extremely high-quality) printing by Midwestern State University Press. This volume is a labor of love by Preston and Nelson and it won’t be available in bookstores. Stay tuned here for a link to Photo Eye Books in Santa Fe, which will be carrying the book for sale over the internet.
  
  The Big Bend country of Texas remains one of the most extraordinary landscapes in America. The geology of the Big Bend has been called the most complex on earth, a land built and wrecked over 700 million years by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, lava flows, floods, faulting, uplifts and erosion. It contains every kind of mountain known to geology. The Big Bend is home to some of the richest flora and fauna in North America, thick with mountain lions, rare bighorn desert sheep, and more species of birds than any other piece of land its size in North America.
  
  In 1996, Walter W. Dalquest and Rose Dalquest donated a remote and unknown canyon in the Big Bend, known as the Devil’s Graveyard, to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, to be used for research into the natural sciences.
  
  Ribbons of Time is a deep portrait, in photographs and text, of this extraordinary Texas canyon, a land truly lost in time. It is a forbidding and violent fissure in the earth, seventy miles from the nearest town, so rugged that much of it is barely penetrable even on foot, a landscape visited by probably fewer than a dozen white people over its entire existence. Here, avalanches are a common occurrence, flash floods tear through the washes hurling along eight foot boulders, and temperatures at the ground in summer can exceed 150 degrees. But it is also a place of breathtaking beauty, where springs drip from walls of maidenhair fern, where pools lie hidden at the base of lava cliffs, where mysterious rock formations challenge one’s sense of reality.
  
  Famed Southwestern photographer Walter W. Nelson spent two years exploring this remarkable canyon. He built a trail down into it, packed in his supplies by muleback, and established several base camps.
  
  Among the equipment he packed down on muleback was a huge 8 x 10 Deardorff view camera of the exact kind used by Ansel Adams. Nelson visited and lived in the canyon across four seasons, photographing its magnificent geological formations, springs, plants, animals, and big skies. He experienced the canyon’s extremes:
  
  awesome electrical storms, avalanches, flash floods, intense heat, ice storms, and downpours that turned the canyon’s cliffs into a breathtaking spectacle of ten thousand waterfalls. The magnificent and rare photography in this volume is the result of that two-year odyssey.
  
  Douglas Preston’s text recounts the sweeping history of the canyon, beginning with its birth in violence and fire some fifty million years ago. The story of the canyon is the history of trans-Pecos Texas in miniature: the canyon is flanked on the east by the Great Comanche War Trail and on the west by the Chihuahua Trail, and it thus lies squarely in the middle of Texas history. Here you will read about the Clovis mammoth hunters, early Spanish explorers, the Apache wars, Texas Rangers, pioneers, Eastern “starve-outs,” ranchers, outlaws, cowboys, and railroad men—all of whom shaped this land with their blood, sweat, and tears.
  
  The result is Ribbons of Time, a rare and elegant volume which combines photographic art, history, and science in a deep exploration of a unique and unknown Texas canyon. There are few undiscovered places left in America. This is one of them.

  NOTE: 
  
  The publisher has created a special, signed, limited edition of Ribbons of Time, limited to 50 specially bound and slip-cased volumes. Each copy is numbered, and personally signed by Douglas Preston and Walter Nelson. Three original, unbound photographic prints, signed by Nelson, come with each volume. The volumes are available for purchase from Photo Eye Books of Santa Fe, one of the leading photographic bookstores in the country, which also has an excellent website.
  Here is a link to the book on their website. (Please tell them that DREAMWalker Group sent you!)
  
  All these prints are available for purchase from Walter Nelson. For more information, please email Walter at WNelson940 at aol dot com (We've written the email address this funny way to disguise if from email sniffing spam programs.)