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CABINET OF CURIOSITIES by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child Warner Books, June 2002 466 pages $25.95 ISBN: 0446530220 Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Horror thrillers are not my steady diet, but I do occasional like to try one of the better ones. I was introduced to Preston and Child when I read Relic. It didn't really impress me much. I think I read a couple of other books of theirs as well, but none of the details stayed with me. The writing is slick, so the books are readable. However, with Cabinet of Curiosities the pair has finally got me with a great story and decent characters.

During the 19th century, with no radio or television or movies to entertain them, people flocked to "museums" full of grotesque and bizarre displays, such as 2 headed calves, shrunken heads, and other anomalies and fakes. P. T. Barnum ran one for a while. (Now, of course, we have cable TV) In this case, a new apartment building is planned for the site of one of the old cabinets. The excavation turns up a charnel house under the old building, 12 stone archways with 3 skeletons of young men and women in each alcove.

FBI Special Agent Pendergast brings archeologist Dr. Nora Kelly from the "New York Museum of Natural History" to the site and asks her to treat it as she would a dig. In the short time she has to work, she discovers that the people had been dismembered, and the bones bear strange scraping marks. Some clothing has also been carelessly tossed into each gravesite. She manages to hide a dress before the developer, the Mayor, and the police chase her out and start to destroy the vault.

Then a body is found in the Ramble in Central Park. A body whose bones bear the same strange scraping marks as the bones from the late 19th century bore. And then another body is found. Is it possible that the serial killer has lived for over 130 years and is beginning to strike again?

Pendergast, who is independently wealthy and keeps a pied-a-terre in The Dakota, is stabbed by the man dubbed "The Surgeon" by the New York press. In an homage to Jack Finney's Time and Again the FBI agent, lying in Lenox Hill Hospital, a building which has existed since the 1870s, wills himself back in time to the period just before the burning of the Shottum's Cabinet, and sees a possible solution to the crime.

I couldn't put this book down. The detail is exquisite and the description of the archives of the museum plausible. Pendergast, Kelly, and Smithback (the New York Times reporter) have all appeared in at least one other of the pair's books. They promise that the next book will feature the enigmatic Pendergast. I look forward to it.