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In the thriller genre, the hero must endure and overcome a series of harrowing encounters with the bad guys before triumphing.
In “Gideon’s Corpse,” the second in a series by best-selling writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, our never-out-of-breath hero Gideon Crew, a Los Alamos nuclear scientist, predictably escapes one close call after another after another.
The issue is never if he’ll escape, but how. It’s the thrill of the ride that counts, and “Gideon’s Crew” gives the reader a front seat as Gideon tries, chapter by chapter, to find the terrorists behind an apparent planned nuclear attack on Washington, D.C.
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“Gideon’s Corpse” by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child Grand Central Publishing, $26.99, 355 pp. |
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You’ll ride horseback with him and Alida, a momentary love interest, shackled to each other, through the Jemez backcountry, fleeing government agents. You’ll push through a long tunnel under Los Alamos National Laboratory as they leave behind more government agents. You’re along for the bumpy ride with him and a good-guy federal agent in a small plane forced to land on a California highway after someone tampered with the fuel. You’ll see them, momentarily outnumbered, get into a fight with dueling cattle prods and chain saws.
The story sometimes falls into silliness, as when the authors compare the prods to swords and drop in this laughable bit of background: “Swords. Thanks to a cute girl with swashbuckling proclivities, Gideon had briefly dabbled with fencing in high school.”
If indeed Doomsday is at hand, the novel downplays the fear in New York City after Reed Chalker, a colleague of Crew’s, who is armed, radioactive and paranoid and holding hostages, is in a standoff with police and the FBI.
For example, chapter 19 opens with Gideon walking from the Santa Fe Plaza to the home of author Simon Blaine to get information on Chalker. The next paragraph awkwardly shifts to the countdown to a presumed nuclear attack in Washington, D.C. The authors have Gideon “glad to be in Santa Fe instead of New York, which was a total mess. Most of the Financial District, Wall Street, the World Trade Center site, and the area of Midtown around the Empire State Building had been abandoned – followed inevitably by looting, fires and National Guard deployments. …” You know, the inevitable. The conclusion twists. Fear not. Gideon should return for another assignment.
David Steinberg is the Journal’s Books editor and an Arts writer.
Douglas Preston (in person) and Lincoln Child (via Skype) discuss “Gideon’s Corpse” at 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, in the auditorium of the Main Public Library, Fifth and Copper NW. Seating is limited.
