Pendergast Books in Order: How to read Preston and Child’s series?

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Written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Pendergast series is about Aloysius Pendergast. He is a special agent with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and works out of the New Orleans branch.

Pendergast is a tall and eccentric man, but he is also highly intelligent and knowledgeable, a master of psychological manipulation, disguise, and improvisation. In his work, he investigates cases that interest him, especially the ones that appear to be the work of serial killers.

How to read the Agent Pendergast Series in Order?

Agent Pendergast appeared in several stand-alone novels and stars in two trilogies. Also, in the first two books, he was not the main protagonist of his series.

  1. Relic – Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum’s dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human…
  2. Reliquary – Hidden deep beneath Manhattan lies a warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries, mostly forgotten by those who walk the streets above. When two grotesquely deformed skeletons are found deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid the investigation.
  1. The Cabinet of Curiosities – In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are thirty-six bodies – all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city.
    The nightmare has begun. Again.
  2. Still Life with Crows – A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground. Is it a serial killer, a man with the need to destroy? Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land? Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America’s heartland. No one is safe.

The Diogenes trilogy

The next three Agent Pendergast books need to be read in order.

  1. Brimstone – A body is found in the attic of a fabulous Long Island estate. There is a claw print scorched into the wall, and the stench of sulfur chokes the air. When FBI Special Agent Pendergast investigates the gruesome crime, he discovers that thirty years ago four men conjured something unspeakable.
  2. Dance of Death – Two brothers. One is a top FBI agent. The other is a brilliant, twisted criminal. An undying hatred between them. Now, a perfect crime. And the ultimate challenge: Stop me if you can…
  3. The Book of the Dead – An FBI agent, rotting away in a high-security prison for a murder he did not commit. His brilliant, psychotic brother, about to perpetrate a horrific crime. A young woman with an extraordinary past, on the edge of a violent breakdown. An ancient Egyptian tomb with an enigmatic curse is about to be unveiled at a celebrity-studded New York gala… Memento Mori.

  1. The Wheel of Darkness – A luxury ocean liner on its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic, awash in wealth and decadence. An ancient Tibetan box, its contents unknown, sealed with a terrifying warning. An FBI agent destined to confront what he fears most – himself…
  2. Cemetery Dance – William Smithback, a reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment. Eyewitnesses claim that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor – a man who was already dead and buried weeks earlier. While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta undertake their own private quest for the truth.

The Helen trilogy

The next three Agent Pendergast books need to be read in order.

  1. Fever Dream – Yesterday, Special Agent Pendergast still mourned the loss of his beloved wife, Helen, who died in a tragic accident in Africa twelve years ago. Today, he discovers she was murdered. Tomorrow, he will learn her most guarded secrets, leaving him to wonder: Who was the woman I married? Why was she murdered? And, above all… Who murdered her?
  2. Cold Vengeance – Devastated by the discovery that his wife, Helen, was murdered, Special Agent Pendergast must have retribution. But revenge is not simple. As he stalks his wife’s betrayers, he is also forced to dig further into Helen’s past. And he is stunned to learn that Helen may have been a collaborator in her own murder.
  3. Two Graves – When a string of bizarre murders erupts across several Manhattan hotels-perpetrated by a boy who seems to have an almost psychic ability to elude capture-NYPD Lieutenant D’Agosta asks his friend Pendergast for help. Reluctant at first, Pendergast soon discovers that the killings are a message from his wife’s kidnappers. But why a message? And what does it mean?

  1. Extraction (Short Story) – Pendergast tells the story of how Diogenes and he encountered a local urban legend as children, a man acting as the Tooth Fairy.
  2. White Fire – In 1876, in a mining camp called Roaring Fork in the Colorado Rockies, eleven miners were killed by a rogue grizzly bear. Today, Corrie Swanson has arranged to examine the miners’ remains. When she makes a shocking discovery, town leaders try to stop her from exposing their community’s dark and bloody past. Just as Special Agent Pendergast arrives to rescue his protege, the town comes under siege by a murderous arsonist.
  3. Blue Labyrinth – A long-buried family secret has come back to haunt Pendergast. It begins with murder. One of Pendergast’s most implacable, most feared enemies is found on his doorstep, dead. Pendergast has no idea who is responsible for the killing, or why the body was brought to his home. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect crime, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased.
  4. Gaslighted: Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast (Short Story) – Pendergast wakes up in Stony Mountain Sanatorium and confronts himself with a great dilemma: is Slappy the Dummy part of his dream? Or is reality itself the dream of an insane man?
  5. Crimson Shore – Pendergast, together with his ward Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton. Pendergast and Constance soon learn that Exmouth is a town with a very dark and troubled history.
  1. The Obsidian Chamber – After a harrowing, otherworldly confrontation on the shores of Exmouth, Massachusetts, Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is missing, presumed dead. Sick with grief, Pendergast’s ward, Constance, retreats to her chambers beneath the family mansion at 891 Riverside Drive – only to be taken captive by a shadowy figure from the past. Proctor, Pendergast’s longtime bodyguard, springs to action, chasing Constance’s kidnapper through cities, across oceans, and into wastelands unknown.
  2. City of Endless Night – When Grace Ozmian, the daughter of a wealthy tech billionaire, first goes missing, the NYPD assumes she has simply sped off on another wild adventure. Until the young woman’s body is discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Queens, the head is nowhere to be found. Lieutenant CD’Agosta quickly takes the lead. He knows his investigation will attract fierce scrutiny, so D’Agosta is delighted when Pendergast shows up at the crime scene assigned to the case.
  3. Verses for the Dead – After an overhaul of leadership at the FBI, Pendergast is forced to work with a partner. With junior agent Coldmoon, they are assigned to Miami Beach, where a rash of killings by a bloodthirsty psychopath is distinguished by a confounding M.O.: cutting out the hearts of his victims and leaving them–along with cryptic handwritten letters.
  1. Crooked River – Appearing out of nowhere to horrify the quiet resort town of Sanibel Island, Florida, dozens of identical, ordinary-looking shoes float in on the tide and are washed up on the tropical beach-each one with a crudely severed human foot inside. Called away from vacation elsewhere in the state, Agent Pendergast reluctantly agrees to visit the crime scene–and, despite himself, is quickly drawn in by the incomprehensible puzzle.
  2. Bloodless – On the evening of November 24, 1971, D. B. Cooper hijacked Flight 305 – Portland to Seattle – with a fake bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000, and parachuted into the night, never to be seen again… Perhaps. Fifty years later, Agent Pendergast takes on a bizarre and gruesome case: in the ghost-haunted city of Savannah, Georgia, bodies are found completely drained of blood–sowing panic and reviving the infamous legend of the Savannah Vampire.
  3. The Cabinet of Dr. Leng – Against all odds, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins, New York City in the late 1800s, and sets off on a quest to prevent the events that lead to the deaths of her sister and brother, and stop Manhattan’s most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng of the seminal Pendergast novel The Cabinet of Curiosities, before his nefarious experiments come to fruition.

If you like our article about the Pendergast series in order, don’t forget to bookmark it! Also, you may want to read Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent series or Lisa Gardner’s books.

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