Synopsis
When two skeletons are found off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator and anthropological expert Margo Green is called in by the police because of her earlier experiences in battling a horrific beast in the museum. By the best-selling authors of Relic.
Reviews
The doughty crew that bested Mbwun, a flesh-eating Amazonian creature that stalked its victims through Manhattan's Museum of Natural History, in Relic (1994), faces a new but all too familiar threat. When the skeletal remains of a socially prominent young woman are flushed out of an Upper West Side storm drain, sans skull, NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta seeks assistance from anthropologist Margo Green and her sometime mentor Dr. Frock. With timely help from a mysterious FBI agent known only as Pendergast, the technocrats eventually put paid to the reptilian Museum Beast that, deprived of its dietary staple (a lily indigenous to Brazil's rainforest), had found human brains an acceptable substitute. Suspecting the past and present cases may be linked, D'Agosta becomes convinced when he learns that the decapitation rate among the underground homeless is on the rise. Pendergast reaches out to the subterranean community, discovering it's being depopulated by brutish beings who dwell in the so-called Devil's Attic, a network of railroad tunnels linking Grand Central Terminal with the suburbs. Meantime, Margo learns that a former colleague has genetically engineered an equivalent of the Mbwun lily (for its narcotic and regenerative properties), which can survive in the Northern Hemisphere. While the unfortunate young man's work went awry, another evil genius took on the project, and monster edibles are growing in the Central Park Reservoir. D'Agosta's panicky superiors decide to exterminate the predatory new mole people (who revere a mad scientist as their messiah) by flooding the Devil's Attic. Once the point of no return is passed, however, Margo determines that the toxic lilies could wash out to sea and do irreparable harm to Earth's food chain. With but hours to go until a wall of water from upstate basins sweeps through the netherworld caverns, then, Pendergast and a band of Navy SEALs must battle their way into the pitch-black abyss to keep the flow contained. Ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. . . in rerun. (Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The curator of the Natural History Museum rejoins police and the FBI as they attempt to solve horrific murders. A frightening sequel to The Relic, it's a terrific read on its own.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The netherworld of New York City?its subways, aqueducts, sewers and the homeless who inhabit them?proves as shuddery a setting for the authors' latest scientific monster mash as the American Museum of Natural History did for their bestselling Relic, to which this is the sequel. In the earlier novel, Mbwun, a ferocious creature that seemed part reptile, part human, rampaged through the museum killing people. The sequel, set 18 months after Mbwun was destroyed, opens with a police diver finding the headless bodies of two people apparently killed by underground cannibals. The corpses are sent to the museum's lab for analysis, which brings a number of returnees from Relic?burly homicide cop Vincent D'Agosta, anthropologist Margo Green, New York Post crime reporter Bill Smithback?to the case. They're soon joined by the novels' Sherlock Holmes figure, the irresistibly cool Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI. Forays by these principals into the kingdom of the Mole People (underground homeless), plus some forensic breakthroughs, point to a race of mini-Mbwun at work in an escalating series of savage killings that incite the city's upper crust to civil disobedience. The city's answer, to flood its nether vaults, turns out to threaten a global catastrophe that only Pendergast and company, aided by Navy SEALS, can avert. The story's "surprise" ending makes as much sense as ketchup on popcorn, and the entire novel has a desperate air about it as the authors stuff it with complications and, by pitting the homeless against the swells, try to create a kind of Decapitation of the Vanities. It's high on suspense and tremendous fun in parts, though, especially when exploring the city's nightmare underbelly. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This should do for the New York subway system what Jaws did for Long Island beaches. Barely has the excitement of the museum killings (related in Preston and Child's recently filmed Relic [1995]) settled down, than Lieutenant D'Agosta of the NYPD is faced with another series of murders. Dr. Margo Green, the odious scribbler Smithback, FBI Agent Pendergast, and others from Relic are gradually drawn to investigate the death of a Manhattan socialite as well as the less newsworthy murders of several "mole people" --the disaffected and alienated who have formed communities in the old subways, sewers, drainage tunnels, and other deep recesses of Manhattan. Some thoroughly repellent, ghoulish types are the murderous culprits, and Preston and Child skillfully play subplots against each other, as the police and their allies attempt to defeat their horrific opponents before catastrophe overwhelms the Apple. Although Reliquary is a sequel, its exposition carries us easily into the new plot and excites interest in seeing what Preston and Child come up with next, after this yarn's all-loose-ends-tied finale. Dennis Winters
The discovery of two decapitated skeletons in the murky sludge of the Harlem River necessitates the forensic services of anthropologists Margo Green and Dr. Frock, who worked together in The Relic (LJ 9/15/94). New York Post reporter Bill Smithback also returns, looking for a major scoop via a society victim's mother, as does Lieutenant D'Agosta, who has connected these gruesome?possibly cannibalistic?deaths to a series of like murders in the scary tunnels beneath the city. This meaty blend of police procedural, thriller, and horror flick should prove most popular and may revive interest in the earlier best seller. Essential.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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