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THUNDERHEAD
By: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Warner Books, New York
1999 (hc)
A little over a year ago I reviewed Douglas Preston’s
The Codex, and noted that Preston represented one half of the writing
team of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, who as a team wrote awfully good
thrillers and that I hoped to review one of their co-authored works at an
early date. Thunderhead, one of their earlier efforts, seemed an
ideal choice as its plot is steeped in Southwestern archaeology and it is
one heck of a thriller!
The novel starts out with a bang as Nora Kelly, a
rather junior archaeologist at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute, is
viciously attacked in the abandoned ranch house that was once her home as a
little girl. Her assailants are foul creatures clothed in wolf-like
apparel, creatures that bear only a slight resemblance to human beings! She
is rescued by her next door neighbor, Teresa Gonzales, but in the aftermath
of the struggle finds a letter written sixteen years earlier by her
treasure-hunting ne’er-do-well archaeologist father – the father who had
gone missing at about the time the letter was originally written. In the
letter, her father claimed to have found a trail leading to the lost city of
Quivira, a city of gold for which Coronado supposedly searched throughout
the desert Southwest. He claims the lost city is hidden among the
labyrinthine canyons of Utah, and Nora, despite her somewhat shaky position
within the Santa Fe Institute tries to persuade the aristocratic Chairman of
the Board, Ernest Goddard, to allow her to mount an expedition to find the
fabled city. To her great surprise, Goddard agrees but stipulates that he
will select the expedition crew—which will include is imperious yet
brilliant and beautiful daughter, Sloane. Early on the reader senses that
Nora and Sloane—both queen bees of the expedition—may not be entirely
suitable teammates! But Goddard believes in the essential accuracy of Pat
Kelly’s letter and that Quivira, if it truly exists, holds the answers to
the fate of the Anasazi, the people who dwelt in the magnificent cliff
dwellings like Chaco Canyon some 800 years earlier.
The pace of the book is perfectly balanced between the
slow, almost languid, narrative of the expedition winding through the
canyons and cliff tops of Utah on horseback and brief moments of horrific
revelation that tells the reader in no uncertain terms that this will be no
ordinary archaeological survey. A small cliff dwelling discovered along the
way hint at dark practices of its aboriginal occupants; we find out that
Nora’s neighbor and savior from attack, Teresa Gonzales, is herself brutally
mutilated and killed; some of the expedition packhorses are ritually
butchered. And when Quivira is finally discovered in a long lost canyon,
despite its being described by one of the senior field archaeologists as
“one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time,” the very air
of the long-dead city seems permeated with evil. Why was such a resplendent
city located so far from other Anasazi centers? Why was it built with such
attention to defensive concerns? Why did it seem to have been abandoned in
an instant, with everything left in situ? Preliminary investigations
point toward the possibility of abominable practices carried out at Quivira—with
unmistakable signs of cannibalism and torture in a large tomb that seems
more a charnel house than a resting place for the dead.
Almost inevitably members of the crew begin to turn on
each other; the expedition is imperiled by evil from the outside as it is
apparent that they are being stalked by a devilish foe, by personal hatreds
and jealousies that threaten them from within, and the forces of nature – a
monstrous thunderstorm bears down on them—threatens to destroy them and
everything else in its path.
This is the literature of high adventure at its best
and Preston and Child are among its best practitioners. Thunderhead
deserves a strong four trowels!
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