Review: Cold Vengeance

Cold Vengeance, which is co-authored by Doglas Preston and Lincoln Child, is the latest novel in my favourite series, featuring FBI Special Agent Aloysius X.L Pendergast, and the second in the Helen Esterhazy Trilogy.

In the first novel of the trilogy (Fever Dream), the reader learns how Pendergast's wife, Helen Esterhazy, died twelve years earlier: she was murdered by a man-eating lion on a big-game hunting excursion, and her brother, Judson, had something to do with it. In the Cold Vengeance installment, the reader learns that Helen is supposedly still alive, and that her death was all a ploy. As to why, the reader is only given information that it has to do with "the Covenent," a top-secret society that even the brilliant Pendergast has very little knowledge of.

Cold Vengeance takes the reader through the moorlands of Scotland, to New Orleans (Pendergast's city of origin), along with the streets of New York City. As always, Pendergast shows up at the most inconvenient of times, with his own agenda. As well, his cat-like grace, along with mellifluous voice, adds to the annoyance of those he's pissing off. Actually, his tendancies to be a royal pain in the ass brings me as much enjoyment as the fast, never-boring pace of the story itself. When Pendergast confronts a rather excitable character, who refers to the FBI Special Agent as a bastard, Pendergast can't help but reply, in his honeyed tone, "I'm not a bastard. But I am an exceedingly desperate man who will do anything to get what he wants." The story keeps true with this statement, barely slowing down long enough to catch half a breath. 

This novel isn't my favourite in the Pendergast series (that title belongs to The Cabinet of Curiosities), however, that by no means makes it a poor story. It kept my attention, unintentionally left me reading late into the night, and it also harbours a small side story that has yet to be told in full involving Pendergast's Ward, Constance Green. She's supposedly an insane, down-to-earth murderess who killed her infant child, the son of Pendergast's long-deceased brother Diogenes, by throwing him over the side of a ship. However, the reader learns that the child's alive, and that having her locked up in a mental institution for the criminally insane is all part of a bigger, possibly more sinister, plan. Whether or not such a plan is sinister, I do not know, but I wouldn't put such an idea past the FBI agent.

The fate of Helen Esterhazy is to be outlined in the next novel, the final installement of the trilogy, Two Graves, which has yet to be published, and that I'm impatiently waiting for. Hopefully, in the third part of the Esterhazy miniseries, we'll not only learn of Helen's fate, and whether or not one of my favourite characters is really dead, but what this greater scheme involving Constance boils down to.

If you enjoy fast-paced action with a healthy dose of sarcasm, I highly recommend reading the Pendergast novels. You won't be disappointed.

Pendergast novels (in order)
Relic
Reliquary
The Cabinet of Curiosities
Still Life With Crows
Brimstone
Dance of Death
The Book of the Dead
The Wheel of Darkness
Cemetery Dance
Fever Dream
Cold Vengeance

Still to come:
Two Graves