Thunderhead - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

    1999; 533 pages.  New Authors? : No and no.  Genre : Suspense; Thriller; Native American Literature; Archaeology.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Nora Kelly has archaeology in her genes.  Seriously.  Her father, Padraig “Pat” Kelly, was an archaeologist, and he passed on his passion for the science to his daughter.

    That happened a long time ago.  Her father's been missing ever since he went on an expedition sixteen years ago, searching for the semi-mythical “Lost City of Quivira”.   Everyone has long given up on finding him alive.

    Nora has a comfortable, albeit humdrum, job as a teacher at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute.  She’s just an assistant archaeologist, so heading up an expedition of any import is only a distant dream.

    So she was both surprised and alarmed when she was recently attacked as she routinely checked on her father’s long-abandoned ranch.  The assailants were hideous creatures, with penetrating red eyes, cloaked in animal skins, and demanding Nora give them some sort of letter from her father.  Nora was lucky to escape with her life, and was left without a clue as to what letter they were talking about.

    Naturally, said letter did turn up shortly thereafter, although it appears to have been written a long time ago.  In it, Pat Kelly relates his excitement, convinced that he had found Quivira.

    But that was many years ago, and nothing came of it.  Why would anyone be upset about such a letter?  And more importantly, why would anyone mail it after a wait of sixteen years?

What’s To Like...

    Thunderhead is a fairly early collaboration between Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and is not part of their popular Agent Pendergast series, although a journalist here, Bill Smithback, is also in the first two Pendergast books, Relic and Reliquary.  The challenge for the two authors was to imbue an archaeological expedition, which is an inherently tedious undertaking, with thrills and spills every step of the way.  They succeed admirably.

     I counted six mysteries for Nora to deal with:  a.) solving the mystery of her dad’s disappearance; b.) searching for Quivira; c.) figuring out why someone stole both her hairbrush and her dog; d.) are Nora’s attackers natural or supernatural?; e.) why do it smell of flowers whenever they're near?; and f.) finding out who mailed dad’s letter after a 16-year delay.  Happily, all of these plot threads are resolved, although a couple of them aren’t tied up until the epilogue.

    My boyhood dream was to become an archaeologist, so this kind of story always resonates with me.  I’m also a history buff, so the heavy tie-in to the Anasazi culture was also a big plus.  The excavation portion of the story seemed realistic, despite the storytelling need to add lots of action and intrigue into it.

    Preston & Child use a number of settings besides the expedition itself into the story, and this helps keep things from bogging down.  Nora’s brother, Skip, has his hands full back in their hometown Santa Fe; a solitary Native American who likes to go camping by himself in the Utah desert also figures into the tale; the marina from whence the expedition embarked has a couple scenes as well, and of course, the baddies have their own secret places to lurk and spring from.

    I liked the character development.  All the players come in various shades of gray, which made guessing who would live and who would die quite the challenge.  Nora herself has some character flaws that surface as she leads the expedition into the outback.  I smiled at the nods to Waiting for Godot and the artist Magritte, and the titular thunderhead that shows up late in the story.  As with any Preston & Child offering, there’s a fair amount of cussing, one or two rolls-in-the-hay, and lots of violence.

    The ending is up to the authors’ usual standards.  It’s tense, exciting, and full of action.  I wouldn’t call it very twisty, but I thought the bittersweet epilogue was done quite well.  This is a standalone story, and except for the presence of Smithback, not associated with any other P&C stories.

Kewlest New Word...

Zoomorphic (adj.) : having or representing animal forms or gods of animal forms.

Others : Frowsy (adj.); Clonus (n.); Talus (n.; the rock formation, not the bone)

Excerpts...

    “Coprolite expert, too,” said Aragon, nodding toward Black.

    “Coprolite?”  Smithback thought for a moment.  “Isn’t that fossilized shit, or something?”

    “Yes, yes,” Black said with irritation.  “But we work with anything to do with dating.  Human hair, pollen, charcoal, bone, seeds, you name it.  Feces just happens to be especially informative.  It shows what people were eating, what kind of parasites they had-“

    “Feces,” said Smithback.  “I’m getting the picture.”

    “Dr. Black is the country’s leading geochronologist,” Nora said quickly.

    But Smithback was shaking his head.  “And what a business to be in,” he chortled.  “Coprolites.  Oh, God.  There must be a lot of openings in your field.”  (pg. 127)

    “My village,” he said, gesturing northward, “is that way.  Nankoweap.  It means ‘Flowers beside the Water Pools’ in our language.  I come out here every summer to camp for a week or two.  The grass is good, plenty of firewood, and there’s a good spring down below.”

    “You don’t get lonely?” Smithback asked.

    “No,” he said simply.

    “Why?”

    Beiyoodzin seemed a little taken aback by his directness.  He gave Smithback a curiously penetrating look.  “I come here,” he said slowly, “to become a human being again.”

    “What about the rest of the year?” Smithback asked.  (pg. 323)

“Dead reckoning,” Smithback murmured.  “Never did like the sound of that.”  (pg. 142)

    There’s never much to quibble about in a Preston-&-Child novel.  The action starts quickly: by page 6 a death struggle is already underway, but after that things slow down a bit, as Nora works to gets funding for the expedition, and outfits it.

    Quadrupeds generally do not fare very well in the story; PETA enthusiasts will probably get in a tizzy over some of the scenes.  And a few of the plot threads were resolved just a tad bit too conveniently, especially those addressed in the epilogue.

    But I pick at nits.  Thunderhead is a fine offering from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and I enjoyed almost as much as any of the Agent Pendergast books.  Devotees to that series will be entertained with this one as well.

    8 Stars.  The search for Quivira is a historical fact.  Various Spanish explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries searched in vain for it, most notably Coronado.  The Wikipedia article about it can be found here.