DOUGLAS PRESTON – Verses For The Dead

He’s the author (or co-author) of nearly 40 books and has written both riveting fictional suspense and gripping non-fiction exposé. More than 20 of his books have ascended the New York Times Bestseller list and several have topped the list as #1 Bestsellers.

He has traveled around the world, lived in a number of countries, and won awards for his work both in America and abroad. He has explored the jungles of Central America where he worked with a team, beset by torrential rain, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes as they searched for a lost city.

He has also spent time in Italy, researching the files of one of Italy’s most notorious serial killers. He recounts that experience during our conversation. We also discuss working with a writing partner, as he does for the Award-Winning series featuring FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast.

Last week, I was asked in a writing group if an author could write both fiction and non-fiction. Today, we’re going to talk with someone who has won a long list of accolades for doing exactly that. His work is in print. His work is on the big screen. His work has, and is, being developed into Television Series. World renowned author, Douglas Preston takes us on today’s adventure…

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Doug’s Social Media Footprint…


 

Our Inside the Writer’s Workshop segment on YouTube

 

Preview & Order Doug’s Books…


…AMAZON LINK…

A psychopathic killer who leaves notes on local gravestones???

 

After an overhaul of leadership at the FBI’s New York field office, A. X. L. Pendergast is abruptly forced to accept an unthinkable condition of continued employment: the famously rogue agent must now work with a partner. Pendergast and his new colleague, junior agent Coldmoon, are assigned to investigate a rash of killings in Miami Beach, where a bloodthirsty psychopath is cutting out the hearts of his victims and leaving them with cryptic handwritten letters at local gravestones. The graves are unconnected save in one bizarre way: all belong to women who committed suicide.
But the seeming lack of connection between the old suicides and the new murders is soon the least of Pendergast’s worries. Because as he digs deeper, he realizes the brutal new crimes may be just the tip of the iceberg: a conspiracy of death that reaches back decades.

 

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The latest release in the Pendergast series (Feb.2020)…

 

Appearing out of nowhere to horrify the quiet resort town of Sanibel Island, Florida, dozens of identical, ordinary-looking shoes float in on the tide and are washed up on the tropical beach–each one with a crudely severed human foot inside.

Called away from vacation elsewhere in the state, Agent Pendergast reluctantly agrees to visit the crime scene–and, despite himself, is quickly drawn in by the incomprehensible puzzle. An early pathology report only adds to the mystery. With an ocean of possibilities confronting the investigation, no one is sure what happened, why, or from where the feet originated. And they desperately need to know: are the victims still alive?

In short order, Pendergast finds himself facing the most complex and inexplicable challenge of his career: a tangled thread of evidence that spans seas and traverses continents, connected to one of the most baffling mysteries in modern medical science. Through shocking twists and turns, all trails lead back to a powerful adversary with a sadistic agenda and who–in a cruel irony–ultimately sees in Pendergast the ideal subject for their malevolent research…

 

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The original chilling Pendergast thriller…

 

Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum’s dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human…

But the museum’s directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.

Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who–or what–is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?

NOTE: Our link goes to the Mass Market Paperback edition. Amazon’s link from the paperback page will pull up the French edition of the Ebook. Please be aware and search Amazon for the correct version of the Ebook before purchase.

 

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A riveting read, built from the true story of the ill-fated Donner Party

Nora Kelly, a young curator at the Santa Fe Institute of Archaeology, is approached by historian Clive Benton with a once-in-a-lifetime proposal: to lead a team in search of the so-called “Lost Camp” of the tragic Donner Party. This was a group of pioneers who earned a terrible place in American history when they became snow-bound in the California mountains in 1847, their fate unknown until the first skeletonized survivors stumbled out of the wilderness, raving about starvation, murder-and cannibalism.

Benton tells Kelly he has stumbled upon an amazing find: the long-sought diary of one of the victims, which has an enigmatic description of the Lost Camp. Nora agrees to lead an expedition to locate and excavate it-to reveal its long-buried secrets.

Once in the mountains, however, they learn that discovering the camp is only the first step in a mounting journey of fear. For as they uncover old bones, they expose the real truth of what happened, one that is far more shocking and bizarre than mere cannibalism. And when those ancient horrors lead to present-day violence on a grand scale, rookie FBI agent Corrie Swanson is assigned the case…only to find that her first investigation might very well be her last.

 

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Available in Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook & Audio


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The astonishing Book #3 in the Agent Pendergast series…

 

NPR has it listed in their roll call of 100 Best Thrillers Ever. It made our list of 10 All-Time Great Crime Fiction Reads. Crack open the pages of The Cabinet of Curiosities and see why we just couldn’t put it down once we started.

Go ahead… Give yourself the gift of ultimate page-turning suspense.

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are thirty-six bodies–all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city. The nightmare has begun…

 

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Available in Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook & Audio


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Step into the jungles of Honduras for an adventure you won’t soon forget…

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.

Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.

 

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Available in Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook & Audio


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A non-fiction read that will give you chills…

In 2000, Douglas Preston fulfilled a dream to move his family to Italy. Then he discovered that the olive grove in front of their 14th century farmhouse had been the scene of the most infamous double-murders in Italian history, committed by a serial killer known as the Monster of Florence. Preston, intrigued, meets Italian investigative journalist Mario Spezi to learn more.

This is the true story of their search for–and identification of–the man they believe committed the crimes, and their chilling interview with him. And then, in a strange twist of fate, Preston and Spezi themselves become targets of the police investigation. Preston has his phone tapped, is interrogated, and told to leave the country. Spezi fares worse: he is thrown into Italy’s grim Capanne prison, accused of being the Monster of Florence himself.

Like one of Preston’s thrillers, The Monster of Florence, tells a remarkable and harrowing story involving murder, mutilation, and suicide-and at the center of it, Preston and Spezi, caught in a bizarre prosecutorial vendetta…

 

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Available in Hardcover, Paperback, Ebook & Audio



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