Reliquary (Pendergast #2), by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

Reliquary by Douglas Preston

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


“Reliquary” is what happens when a sequel mistakes escalation for improvement. Where “Relic” (review) was a fast-paced thriller that, for me, got the basics right and delivered genuine suspense in a tightly contained setting, “Reliquary” sprawls, overexplains, and keeps piling on lurid ideas until the whole thing starts to wobble under its own weight. It still has energy, and now and then it lands a scene well, but mostly I found myself watching it become more absurd with every new revelation.

Its old-fashioned impulse to go big, dirty, and nasty is not a strength here but one more reason the whole thing feels overcooked and heavy-handed. Preston and Child clearly want the New York underworld here, literal and figurative, to feel mythic, diseased, and overwhelming. At moments, that works. There is proper propulsion in some of the descents into the underground, and the book can still generate suspense on a scene-by-scene level. One diving sequence in particular is tense in the moment.

»We dive in shit and look for dead things.«

But the problem is that once I stepped back and looked at what the book was actually asking me to buy into, the effect tipped from thrilling into ridiculous.

That is where the book’s very 1990s flavour becomes a liability rather than a charm. This is not enjoyably pulpy. It feels dated in the bad way: too many points of view, too much explanation, too much macho posturing, and stakes so inflated that they stop meaning much. Smithback is completely expendable, Margo is oddly written as a heroine, D’Agosta leans heavily into the macho-cop register, and Pendergast glides through it all as the suave hero. Those roles are so broad that they often feel less like characters than functions in an overblown blockbuster machine.

»That cute little thing put you up to this, didn’t she? Amazing set of knockers.«

As genre fiction, it also compares badly with sharper horror-thrillers that know when to stop decorating the nightmare. Good subterranean horror narrows your focus and tightens the screws. “Reliquary” keeps expanding outward instead, as if every extra tunnel, faction, and grotesque discovery automatically deepened the menace. It does not. It dilutes it. The book keeps insisting on its own enormity long after the suspense has started leaking away.

Compared with “Relic”, which I found easy, satisfying, and exciting, “Reliquary” is messier in every sense. It is larger, louder, and more grotesque, but also much less disciplined. As a horror-thriller it reminded me of the kind of sequel that assumes more mythology, more tunnels, more corpses, more conspiracy, and more pseudo-scientific menace must automatically mean more fun. For me, it did not.

Instead, it became a novel about trying to prevent a mad scientist’s bioengineered seeds from escaping into the wild by means of a different mad scientist’s subterranean cult, hidden beneath New York in the “Devil’s Attic”, while suave federal men, macho cops, weird heroines, sewer divers, urban legends, and ever-expanding apocalyptic stakes all collide in a fever dream of pseudo-science, baroque underground mythology, and very 1990s excess.

If that doesn’t repel you, go ahead and read this novel.

Two stars out of five.


Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam




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