Cemetery Dance, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Hmmm... where to start?

I guess with the fact that I'm a Preston/Child fan. Or, more accurately, an Agent Pendergast fan. So when I stepped into my local B&N and saw a very prominent display of the new book, yeah I bought it. Screw waiting for the paperback with some series, right? Timothy Zahn, Colleen McCullough (though she's been a letdown lately), and Preston/Child are some of the few authors who can get me to splurge on a hardback when chances are good that I'll find the paperback for free on BookMooch a few months later.

The Preston/Child duo write books that you read when you just want a little suspenseful fluff. It's never brain candy, like Crichton or Bear, or a drawn-out epic like McCullough or Donaldson. Nope, just a day's worth of fun that usually makes you wish the authors would hurry up and crank out the next one. That said, Still Life with Crows is one of my top fifty books ever. Why? Some books are just fun to read.

Pendergast is a (mostly) believable character, a sort of modern day Sherlock Holmes with a Louisiana drawl who just happens to be an FBI agent. (Having watched TrueBlood, I can now sorta imagine his accent in my head while I'm reading.) I enjoy his character because you never really know where he's going with something until he actually gets there.

Anyway, in Cemetery Dance one of the main characters in the previous books is almost immediately killed off. His killer is a man who has supposedly been dead for a bit. Pendergast gets involved because of his prior dealings with the murdered man and because he has a fascination with cases that involve the supposed supernatural. As the book progresses, we begin to see a picture of voudou/obeah influence over a mysterious cult in New York. However, not everything is as it seems.

I didn't particularly enjoy this book as much as previous Preston/Child offerings. It was a little too predictable, there was little real action, and I would've liked more actual development of the voudou angle. (Having studied voudou before, I know that there are a lot of interesting things the authors could have delved into. Animal sacrifice is such a small part of the practice of voudou.)

To sum it up, the little tidbit offered at the end, a little business involving my favorite FBI agent strongly hints at another book in the works. Hopefully it will be offered sooner than next year.

Three stars out of five.