She Treads Softly: Diablo Mesa

Monday, February 7, 2022

Diablo Mesa

Diablo Mesa by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
2/15/22; 400 pages
Grand Central Publishing
Nora Kelly & Corrie Swanson Series #3

Diablo Mesa by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is a very highly recommended excellent thriller and the third book in the Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson series. The gripping plot is engaging from start to finish and engrossing throughout. You can always count on Preston and Child to deliver an entertaining and satisfying story.

Lucas Tappan, a wealthy billionaire and entrepreneur, recruits archaeologist Nora Kelly and her brother Skip to assist a team in a scientific excavation of the Roswell Incident site. Specifically, they will be looking for artifacts at the site where a UFO purportedly crashed in 1947. When examining an aerial survey of the area, Nora detects an area that has indications of being a burial site, so this is the first section she digs up, uncovering two murder victims who were shot in the head and had acid destroy their faces and hands. Nora calls FBI Agent Corrie Swanson, who is assigned the investigation. Corrie has the added benefit of also being a forensic anthropologist. Nora continues on with her excavation of the Roswell crash site while Corrie's homicide investigation uncovers a different facet of the areas intriguing history.

The pages will fly by while reading Diablo Mesa, confirming why Preston and Child are among my favorite authors. This novel has it all. The quality of the writing is excellent. The action keeps moving and the tension and suspense remain high throughout the novel as the two different mysteries evolve simultaneously. Both mysteries and investigations are equally compelling and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. Readers will know that there is more going on, which only serves to increase the tension as the mysteries take a turn to the covert, classified and otherworldly.

Nora and Corrie are both wonderful female protagonists. They are intelligent, strong, resourceful, fearless, and appealing. The two have worked together previously in Old Bones and The Scorpion's Tail, but Diablo Mesa can be read as a standalone novel, although you will likely want to read the previous two novels in their series after you read this one.

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

No comments:

Post a Comment

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.