Douglas Preston

Wie stoppt man einen Serienkiller, der seit 100 Jahren tot ist? Im 21. Abenteuer-Thriller der Bestseller-Autoren Preston & Child um FBI Special Agent Aloisius Pendergast geht es weit in die Vergangenheit zurück – buchstäblich! Nach außen ist Constance Green eine ebenso kluge wie bildhübsche Mittzwanzigerin – doch das Mündel von Special Agent Pendergast ist 140 Jahre alt! Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts ermordete Pendergast wahnsinniger Vorfahre, der Serienkiller Dr. Enoch Leng, nicht nur die Geschwister von Constance, er führte auch düstere Experimente an der jungen Frau durch, die sie bis heute nicht mehr altern lassen. Als Constance nun eine Möglichkeit findet, durch die Zeit zurückzureisen und Leng erneut entgegenzutreten, ergreift sie diese sofort. Doch ihr waghalsiger Plan könnte direkt in eine Falle führen. Im New York der Gegenwart muss Agent Pendergast alles daran setzen, Constance vor ihrer Vergangenheit zu retten ... Mit den schlafraubend spannenden, actionreichen Thrillern um Kult-Ermittler Aloisius Pendergast landen Douglas Preston und Lincoln Child nicht nur in den USA regelmäßig auf den Bestseller-Listen. Die abenteuerliche Thriller-Reihe ist auf Deutsch in folgender Reihenfolge erschienen: Relic – Museum der Angst Attic – Gefahr aus der Tiefe Formula – Tunnel des Grauens Ritual – Höhle des Schreckens Burn Case – Geruch des Teufels Dark Secret – Mörderische Jagd Maniac – Fluch der Vergangenheit Darkness – Wettlauf mit der Zeit Cult – Spiel der Toten Fever – Schatten der Vergangenheit Revenge – Eiskalte Täuschung Fear – Grab des Schreckens Attack – Unsichtbarer Feind Labyrinth – Elixier des Todes Demon – Sumpf der Toten Obsidian – Kammer des Bösen Headhunt – Feldzug der Rache Grave – Verse der Toten Ocean – Insel des Grauens Bloodless – Grab des Verderbens Death – Das Kabinett des Dr. Leng Poison – Schwestern der Vergeltung

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.

The noted legal expert and best-selling author of The Case for Israel looks at the diverse ways in which the religious right has been abusing the Declaration of Independence in an effort to Christianize America, countering arguments that the document was founded on biblical law and providing a case to disprove a grave distortion of one of America's most important documents.

Marshal Guarnaccia feels out of his league when he is assigned to help track down a serial killer, especially when he assigned to work under Simonetti, a man so dedicated to achieving a conviction that he is blinded to the consequences.

From New York Times bestsellers Preston and Child, archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson are tasked with the mysterious deaths of two people found at a site where a UFO allegedly crashed decades before. Lucas Tappan, a wealthy and eccentric billionaire and founder of Icarus Space Systems, approaches the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute with an outlandish proposal—to finance a careful, scientific excavation of the Roswell Incident site, where a UFO is alleged to have crashed in 1947. A skeptical Nora Kelly, to her great annoyance, is tasked with the job. Nora’s excavation immediately uncovers two murder victims buried at the site, faces and hands obliterated with acid to erase their identities. Special Agent Corrie Swanson is assigned to the case. As Nora’s excavation proceeds, uncovering things both bizarre and seemingly inexplicable, Corrie’s homicide investigation throws open a Pandora’s box of espionage and violence, uncovering bloody traces of a powerful force that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets—and that threatens to engulf them all in an unimaginable fate.

HUMANS LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES. I CANNOT. I MAKE NOT MISTAKES. The Thunderhead is the perfect ruler of a perfect world, but it has no control over the scythedom. A year has passed since Rowan has gone off grid. Since then he has become an urban legend, a vigilante snuffing out corrupt scythes in a trial by fire. His story is told in whispers across the continent. As Scythe Anastasia, Citra gleans with compassion and openly challenges the ideals of the "new order." But when her life is threatened and her methods questioned, it becomes clear that not everyone is open to the change. In the thrilling sequel to the Printz Honor Book Scythe, old foes and new enemies converge. And as corruption within the scythedom spreads, Rowan and Citra begin to lose hope. Will the Thunderhead intervene? Or will it simply watch as this perfect world begins to unravel? This description comes from the publisher. Thunderhead is the second book in the Arc of a Scythe, the first of which is Scythe.

"A bonding trip for Pendergast and his brother-in-law, Judson Esterhazy, turns violent. Before abandoning a mortally-wounded Pendergast, Esterhazy announces his sister, Pendergast's long-dead wife Helen, is alive"--Provided by publisher.

"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. There, it will embark on a journey of exploration. As the probe is being tested at Goddard, things go awry, and an explosion kills seven scientists. The AI program in the probe, a powerful, self-modifying AI called "Dorothy," flees into the Internet. Series character Wyman Ford is tapped by the president's science advisor to track down the software with the help of Dorothy's creator, Melissa Shepherd. As the two of them trace Dorothy in her wanderings in cyberspace, they realize Dorothy's horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her--utterly. But for the better . . . or worse? At the same time, they learn Dorothy is being pursued by a pair of Wall Street high-frequency traders, who want to turn her into an algorithmic-trading slave-bot. Pursued relentlessly by the traders, Dorothy jumps out of the Internet into a child's toy robot, to hide. Now the only person standing between the murderous algo traders and Dorothy is a lonely, twelve-year-old boy living on an isolated bay on the coast of northern California. But is Dorothy bent on doing good . . . or on wiping out the cancer of the human race?"--

A top nuclear scientist turns homicidal, taking an innocent family hostage at gunpoint. Gideon Crew, a colleague of the scientist at Los Alamos, is called in to talk the man down. But the standoff ends in an explosion of violence. When the authorities discover the scientist's body is intensely radioactive, and that he had recently embraced Islamic extremism, all hell breaks loose.

For twelve years, he believed she died in an accident. Then, he was told she'd been murdered. Now, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast discovers that his beloved wife Helen is alive. But their reunion is cut short when Helen is brazenly abducted before his eyes. And Pendergast is forced to embark on a furious cross-country chase to rescue her. But all this turns out to be mere prologue to a far larger plot: one that unleashes a chillingly-almost supernaturally-adept serial killer on New York City. And Helen has one more surprise in store for Pendergast: a piece of their shared past that makes him the one man most suited to hunting down the killer. His pursuit of the murderer will take Pendergast deep into the trackless forests of South America, to a hidden place where the evil that has blighted both his and Helen's lives lies in wait . . . a place where he will learn all too well the truth of the ancient proverb: Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God--but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Douglas Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal--and incurable--disease.

That thing is growing again. We must destroy it. The time to act is now...With these words begins Gideon Crew's latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on earth. Five years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, led a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite--the largest ever discovered--from a remote island off the coast of South America. The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic waters and broke apart, sinking-along with its unique cargo-to the ocean floor. One hundred and eight crew members perished, and Eli Glinn was left paralyzed. But his was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space. Now, that organism has implanted itself in the sea bed two miles below the surface-and it is growing. If it is not destroyed, the planet will be doomed. There is only one hope: for Glinn and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon' expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the "meteorite" has a mind of its own and it has no intention of going quietly...

"A long-buried family secret resurfaces when one of Aloysius Pendergast's most implacable enemies shows up on his doorstep as a murdered corpse. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect murder, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased. The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's desolate Salton Sea, which in turn propels him on a journey of discovery deep into his family's sinister past. But Pendergast learns there is more at work than a ghastly episode of family history: he is soon stalked by a subtle killer bent on vengeance over an ancient transgression. In short order, Pendergast is caught in a wickedly clever plot, which will leave him stricken in mind and body ... and may well end with his death"--

From the #1 New York Times bestselling duo, renowned archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson investigate a mystery so enigmatic it may have no solution. In 2008, nine mountaineers failed to return from a winter backpacking trip in the New Mexico mountains. At their final campsite, searchers found a bizarre scene: something had appeared at the door of their tent so terrifying that it impelled them to slash their way out and flee barefoot to certain death in a blizzard. Despite a diligent search, only six bodies were found, two violently crushed and inexplicably missing their eyes. The case, given the code name “Dead Mountain” by the FBI, was never solved. Now, two more bodies from the lost expedition are unexpectedly discovered in a cave, one a grisly suicide. Young FBI Agent Corrie Swanson teams up with archaeologist Nora Kelly to investigate what really happened on that fateful trip fifteen years ago—and to find the ninth victim. But their search awakens a long-slumbering evil, which pursues Corrie and Nora with a vengeance, determined to prevent the final missing corpse from ever coming to light.

Gideon Crew--brilliant scientist, master thief, intrepid adventurer--is shocked when his former employer, Eli Glinn, vanishes without a trace, and Glinn's high-tech lab Effective Engineering Solutions shuts down seemingly overnight. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Crew is contacted by one of his former coworkers at EES, Manuel Garza, who has a bead on one final treasure hinted at in EES's final case, the long-awaited translation of a centuries-old stone tablet of a previously undiscovered civilization: The Phaistos Disc. What lies at the end of the trail will either save Gideon's life--or bring it to a sudden, shocking close. Crew once again faces incredible odds--but as Gideon has proved again and again, there's no such thing as too great a risk when you're living on borrowed time.

In 1695, a notorious English pirate buried his bounty in a maze of booby-trapped tunnels on an island off the coast of Maine. In three hundred years, no one has breached this cursed and rocky fortress. Now a treasure hunter and his high-tech, million-dollar recovery team embark on the perfect operation to unlock the labyrinth's mysteries. First the computers fail. The then crewmen begin to die. The island has guarded its secrets for centuries, and it isn't letting them go--without a fight.