Pendergast is back, or rather, he’s only just getting started. Because this is a prequel that fills in the blanks of the stoic and stranger FBI agent’s beginnings with the bureau. And what a start it is. Pendergast and his mentor, an affable senior agent who has lost his spark thanks to a personal tragedy, come across the baffling case of a serial killer with a predilection for arms. And I don’ mean weapons. I mean actual human arms. And of course, because it’s a Pendergast novel, the killer’s motives are anything but normal, and border on the supernatural. I won’t give anything away here but suffice to say that it’s not hard to see from this book how Pendergast ended up dealing with the Bureau’s strangest cases.
But this isn’t just a Pendergast origin story. We finally get a peek into his enigmatic jack-of-all-trades chauffeur/butler/right hand man, Proctor. Although I do feel that Proctor’s story was somewhat limited in that he really only appears in the first quarter of the book, and again at the end, and doesn’t really have any part to play in the core excitement. It would have been nice to see him a little more involved.
And then there’s Pendergast. He’s young here. A rookie new to the FBI, but he appears to have arrived cut from whole cloth. He’s the same old Pendergast that we know and love from the rest of the series, with no real youthful exuberance or inexperience. He meditates and deduces and grasps the true implications of clues while those around him get it wrong. And while we do get some new information regarding his life prior to the FBI, it’s not as much as I expected when I started the book. One thing I thought worked very well was the New Orleans setting, which made a perfect backdrop for the book. The big easy is such a mysterious place, and a fitting place of origin for a man like Pendergast.
All in all, the book is a wild ride, full of weirdness and murder with a dash of the supernatural. Fans of the series will no doubt wholeheartedly enjoy this installment. Five stars.
