Preston, Douglas & Child, Lincoln: Relic

Starting in the Amazon Basin where an expedition comes to a disastrous end although there is a shipment of collected items, the book tells of the planned opening of an exhibition at the New York Museum of Natural History where the shipment has been received and stored. A series of gruesome murders threatens the opening of the exhibition which would lose the Museum a lot of money. While the corpses are being examined by a scientist in a wheelchair and a woman finalising her Phd work with their efforts under the eye of a New York detective, Pendergast, an FBI agent turns up because of the similarity of the murders with some in New Orleans some time earlier. He wants to close down the exhibition but is overruled politically. The exhibition is opened but the monster performing the killings runs wild in a scene of grand guignol proportions before being itself killed. Full of scientific explanations which I am sure have been well researched and deft character studies of the main characters this is a lenghty but enjoyable read though Pendergast does come across as something of a superman intellectually. This is the first but by no means the last of these author's books in which he appears.