* squirm *

I'm finally doing it— reading Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Dance of Death and its immediate sequel.

(WARNING: spoilers about the Pendergast series up to this point will be bandied about freely as necessary. If you've ever said to yourself "I wonder if The Relic or its sister novels are any good?," the answer is "Mostly!" and you should perhaps read my silly movie reviews instead while you plan to get them from your local library.)

I have a somewhat...unique relationship with these Preston/Child books. They're kind of pulpy fun*, full of interesting ideas, and like most bookish heterosexual women who've ever picked these up, I have a mad passion for Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. I would read Agent Pendergast Watches Paint Dry.

I wish I were. Because they are fairly graphic thriller novels and I am squeamish as blazes. While I can admire, from an artistic standpoint, the authorial duo's willingness to off recurring characters and take risks—they borrowed Collins's Count Fosco as a villain once—I do have to force myself along when people are getting their glands ripped out (The Relic), being cut up by a mad scientist (The Cabinet of Curiosities), or dying horribly from an infernal device I correctly identified on the first try (Brimstone). But I do, even when my response to these is less "Wow! What next??" than "Lord! What now??"

After Brimstone came out, it was announced that it would, with the next two books, form a trilogy that might very well kill off Agent Pendergast. So I did what any sensible long-range planner would do, namely look longingly at the paperbacks and wait for a Pendergast novel to come out after them.

Yes, it probably is neurotic to wait four years to read a book. It could be worse. I could be at the building-infernal-devices stage. :-)

What I've at last decided to do is a sort of live-blog of the books as I read them. Unfortunately, this is an idea I've only had now, about a quarter into the trilogy's third book. So here's a quick recap of my reading experience with Dance of Death:

• Not 20 pages in, a guy rips his own face off. I can't imagine why I put off reading these for so long!
• For some reason, people being framed for things they didn't do makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Alas, this appears to be the main plot of both books.
• Too much teasing with the exposition. We're supposed to be learning about the evil brother, but keep getting cut off whenever anything promising surfaces. There's a fine line between building actual suspense and repeating the errors of The Ring 2 movie.
• Hey! No fair killing off regulars I like!
• It's entirely my own fault for reading ahead in the series (someone gave me a copy of Wheel of Darkness), but knowing something bad is going to happen to one particular character is causing me to drag my feet.
• Hey! No fair killing off new characters I like! (Although this person may have been the bad guy in disguise all along. If not, the real Dr. _____ is quietly liquefying in a closet somewhere.)
  
• Book ended more happily than I'd have expected, for a value of happy where most of the people are injured, sad or incarcerated.

On to Book of the Dead:

• Great. They managed to make the framed-for-murders-he-didn't-commit-thing even worse.
• A new museum exhibit! So far this book seems to be returning to some of the tried-and-true bits of The Relic. I also like the ancient Egyptian angle.
• I do not, do NOT, like what's going on with Diogenes and Constance. If anything happens to that little mouse, I swear to god I'm going to stop reading, even as I know with a sinking heart I'll just start again (See the whole Agent Pendergast Watches Paint Dry bit).
• I'm starting to realize these books are a fast read for me in part because there are large, well-telegraphed sections of them I can't bear to read: my memory for described gore is quite good, so I avoid it strenuously.

I'll update this post as I go, so that maybe I actually will go...

UPDATE, 5/20:

• Oh, no. I think I see where this is going. What is this, Thomas Hardy's Agent Pendergast?
• I expected to hate the entire prison sequence, but it was great.
• Starting to think the bad guy has a thing for Margo, the heroine from The Relic. He keeps not quite killing her.
• Oooh! Much better scheme of evil than I has anticipated!
• Oh, authors. You [Deadwood words] couldn't leave that mouse alone, could you?
• And finally: it is impossible to hold a grudge against a book which ends with hors d'oeuvres shortly after a fight on a volcano.
  

*In no way am I trying to downplay this, since in general I hate explained Gothic, and beneath the pulp-fiction-scientific surface, that's what a lot of these are.