She Treads Softly: Bloodless

Thursday, August 12, 2021

Bloodless

Bloodless by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
8/17/21; 400 pages
Grand Central Publishing
Pendergast Series #20

Bloodless by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is a very highly recommended investigative thriller and the 20th book in the Pendergast series.

Bloodless opens with one of the FBI's most famous unsolved cases occurred on November 24, 1971, when D. B. Cooper hijacked Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. Cooper, who said he had a bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000, and parachuted off the plane. He was never found.

Fifty years later FBI agents Aloysius X.L. Pendergast and Armstrong Coldmoon are sent to Savannah, Georgia, to investigate two bodies that have been found completely drained of blood. Accompanying them is Constance Greene. Behind their case assignment is a U.S. Senator who wants the case quickly taken care of before the bad press jeopardizes his reelection. At the same time, a crew arrives in town to film a documentary on haunted Savannah for Netflix and want to tie the bloodless bodies to rumors of the Savannah Vampire. Pendergast always has a way to find the responsible perpetrator and is always unconventional in how he accomplishes this task.

This entertaining installment in the series can be easily read as a stand-alone since it doesn't tie into any previous cases. And it is a wild weird ride to investigate and solve the case. The great thing is that you can't guess what the final denouement is going to be as Preston and Child always have a shocking twisty solution in their novels and this time it is even more unpredictable. Solving the D.B. Cooper case along side the case of the bloodless bodies is a surprising connection and the ties to the current case is wonderfully unexpected. When you reach the conclusion it is going to be a breathless, action-packed, shocking surprise. You'll never anticipate the directions and places this one will go.

At this point fans know the characters and won't really need much information beyond that which is provided. Those new to the series just need to now that Pendergast and Constance are both enigmas as a characters anyway. Their inscrutability is a constant in most of the novels so any time any unexpected insight is revealed, it is a major development. Sit back and enjoy the investigation, including Coldmoon's preferred coffee.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Grand Central Publishing.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.