This book came out last year and for some reason I never got around to buying it until now. Preston and Child’s books fall into the supernatural thriller category like Dean Koonts that I enjoy.
The Wheel of Darkness is the most recent book in their FBI Agent Pendergast series. After the traumatic events of The Book of the Dead, The Wheel of Darkness begins with Pendergast and Constance Greene, his ward, in the Tibetan Himalayas on their way to a monastery to rest and meditate. Pendergast is not allowed to rest for long when he is summoned to a secret lair in the monastery where he is given the task of finding the monk’s sacred Agozyen. Leaving Constance in Tibet to gather more information on the Agozyen which no living monk has ever seen, Pendergast does some quick detective work and tracks the thief to England and the Agoyzen to the Britannia, the worlds largest cruise ship. Once on board while trying to find the Agoyzen, Constance and Pendergast are simultaneously thrown into an investigation of gruesome murders and reports of a monster that the security staff on the ship is ill equipped to handle.
The Wheel of Darkness was a good read, but compared to other Pendergast books, it is not my favorite. I like several others in the series better and have gone back and reread them. It will be a while before I reread this one. I think the main reason that I did not like it as well was that things seemed to drag out and take forever to move along once they boarded the ship. I think the ship setting limited the amount of plausible action that could be included which may have contributed to things dragging. Don’t me wrong. The book is a page turner. The page tuning aspect was due to the drama of trying to figure out who was what and how all the pieces fit together.
So while not my favorite Pendergast book, I still enjoyed it and recommend it to any one who enjoys supernatural thrillers.
