Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child: Relic

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

The Relic

Monika says:

It all begins like your usual mystery - as long as you call it normal that two little boys are brutally murdered in a museum. The police is baffled because they lack both the killer and a motive. But those aren't the last murders. New York City's Museum of Natural History seems to be a very dangerous place to be, and the employees even talk about a museum monster that lurks in the basement...

Too bad this happens just as the museum is about to open a special exhibition that would help the museum to solve its financial problems. To close the museum until the end of the investigation would be extremely inconvenient. The exhibition about superstition is supposed to draw a great audience and includes a few very rare pieces that reached the museum in mysterious ways and are presented to the
general public for the first time. They are the results of an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon undertaken by anthropologist Whittlesey a couple of years before to find a legendary tribe that was presumed extinct for a long time. Whittlesey was reported missing, and the other members of the expedition died in a plane crash on the way back to civilization. All that is left of the expedition are a few crates with finds that were stored in the museum basement until somebody remembered them when compiling the exhibition.

RELIC is a strange mixture of mystery, science fiction and horror, a book you shouldn't read when you tend to be afraid in the dark. The Museum of Natural History in New York is one of the biggest museums of this kind that features among other things an anthropological department. At the time the murders start Margo Green is writing her doctoral thesis. Her supervisor is evolutionary biologist Professor Frock, a headstrong scientist who is convinced that evolution from time to time produces a grotesque species that replaces all others and is the reason for the big extinction events in Earth history. Then there is Gregory Kawakita, an ambitious young biologist who wrote a computer program to compare genetic codes with. This program is used to track down the museum monster. FBI agent Pendergast has to ask the scientists for help when his investigation seems to go nowhere.

The authors managed to mix the three genres skillfully. The result is a thrilling book that is very hard to put down, unless you don't like to be scared. Part of the special atmosphere of the story is the fact that it takes place in an existing museum. People who like to go to natural history museums may be tempted to listen for the approaching steps of the museum monster at their next visit. The ending makes a sequel inevitable.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child: Relic
Publisher: St. Martin's Press, New York (1994)