A cult of mysteries: Preston and Child deliver a wild desert thriller with ‘Badlands’

“Badlands, A Nora Kelly Novel” is a splendid thriller by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

While the beginning and late scenes serve up some of the most compelling writing in the novel, in between are a series of tension-building moments that propel the story toward a wild and unexpected climax.

The book’s opening chapter zooms in on a solitary trekker.

It is August of 2020 and this unnamed woman is walking alone through the unbearable summer heat of an unidentified desert toward an unstated destination.

She’s headed north on the road, which is more of a ceremonial path, slowly stripping off her clothes as she walks. If she can reach her destination she’ll be safe.

She is suffering from a raging thirst, which brings to her mind the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” she taught in a English lit class in Santa Fe.

She ponders, “This was what that ancient mariner must have felt watching the dry boards of his ship shrink under the sun.”

So we know she is book smart. It’s her behavior that’s off-center. She thinks back to the last few days, buying cheap clothes, burning $20 bills and her cellphone.

If she can only endure in her search for deliverance. 

But deliverance from what?

The trekker spots a woman herding sheep about a mile away and hides from her. She resumes walking and continues to disrobe until she’s naked.

She falls to her knees, “her bare skin hit the ground like meat dropping on a searing griddle.”

She screams, falls backward, can’t escape the heat, “every fresh contact with the sand scorching anew, as she felt her skin crack and pop.”

Curiously, her fists remain clenched as the first stage of postmortem sets in.

Was she suicidal? Or did she commit an act of sacrifice?

The second chapter fast forwards to the present day. A film crew is shooting in the San Juan Basin of northwest New Mexico, on the Ah-shi-sle-pah “badlands” along the eastern border of the Navajo Nation.

A camera-mounted drone gets the landscape shot the director wants when suddenly as the camera lowers, the director spots “a whitish object partially obscured by sand.”

It’s a human skull and bones.

Cops are called in. Leading the investigation is FBI agent Corrie Swanson. Swanson turns to Santa Fe archaeologist and friend Nora Kelly for help.

Nora is drawn to two pebbles the FBI found under the bones. In the dark, the stones “glowed a strange, almost ethereal greenish yellow.” Nora rubs them and green light flashes inside the stones.

She explains to Corrie that they’re rare “lightning stones,” and archaeologists believe ancestral Pueblo people — the Chaco Canyon people — used them in shamanic ceremonies inside a kiva. These same people may have also built a series of lighthouses to track their enemy, the Gallina people. The dead woman is identified as 40-year-old Molly D. Vine of Tesuque.

She was teaching English at Santa Fe High School before disappearing.

Vine had been an anthropology doctoral student under faculty advisor Carlos Oskarbi at the University of New Mexico.

Vine may have been one of a string of female doctoral students with whom Oskarbi was sexually entangled during archaeological digs of the ancient Gallina people.

Oskarbi quit teaching at UNM 12 years before and was believed to have returned to Mexico to further research an Indigenous tribe and its peyote religion, and to reconnect with his mentor Don Benicio.

Nora visits Don Benicio, who disputes that Oskarbi has returned. No one knows the professor’s whereabouts, though later he’s reported as being mummified.

One hundred pages into the novel, a body of a second woman, this one dead four months, is found on the same desert floor clutching a similar lightning stone in a half-opened hand. A second stone is nearby.

Her name was Mandy Driver and she, too, had been a doctoral student who went on Oskarbi-led field trips.

Nora tells Corrie that signs point to human sacrifice in the deaths of Driver and Vine.

Another 100-plus pages in, a third woman — this one alive — is spotted wandering, parched, in the same desert region. She is Elodie Bastien, yet another former Oskarbi grad student carrying lightning stones. Bastien seems catatonic.

Corrie thinks the three women were part of a cult mainly comprised of Oskarbi’s gullible students.

The book’s final chapters are explosive. They’re filled with physical violence, phantasms, drug-induced visions of the supernatural, mask-wearing cultists with bodies smeared with red clay.

Edison Nash, who had gone camping/artifact stealing in Gallina Canyon with Nora’s brother Skip, is flayed alive by the cultists.

The same horrendous fate may await trussed up Corrie, Nora and Skip.

The novel displays a bit of funny-strange author self-promotion: Nora says that on long drives she often listens to audiobooks. On her roundtrip to see Don Benicio she traveled with “a couple of good thrillers by Preston and Child.”

C’mon guys. You might have instead tipped your hats to New Mexico-based authors John Sandford or Michael McGarrity.

“Badlands” is the fifth in the Nora Kelly series. A sixth is planned.