Bad Lands by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Review by Jordan S.
I’ve written about my longtime reading relationship with the books of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child before for Kaiju & Gnome. I’ve written about a prior book in the Nora Kelly series (the series that Bad Lands is the most recent installment of) and how I think it bit off far more than it could chew here. I also wrote a far more positive review of Douglas Preston’s solo work, Extinction, which you can read here. As I mentioned in those reviews, I have a long relationship with the works of Preston and Child and their solo works that has ebbed and flowed with the quality of those books. Some have been fantastic and some have been far less so. Some are incredibly ambitious and others seem more ‘paint-by-numbers.’ I think Bad Lands falls into the latter group of both those descriptions but my frustration with this installment is less about the book itself and more about the series in general. While I tried writing a review about just this book, I realized that it was quickly becoming a review of the Pendergastverse in general (but don’t worry; this review is only going to focus on Nora Kelly’s realm in that larger shared continuity). Unfortunately, we probably should do some housework to make sure we are all on a level playing field.
Leveling the Playing Field
As you might have gleaned from my past reviews of Preston/Child books or from the previous paragraph, Preston/Child’s books take place in a massive shared universe centered around the very special FBI Agent Pendergast. The Pendergast books (and all of Preston/Child’s books for the most part) are part of a larger subgenre called technothrillers or thrillers that largely incorporate science fiction and horror elements but tend to not be too scary or dependent on scientific accuracy. If you need examples of what that looks like the Pendergast series is a pretty good sampling of that subgenre. In that series, Special Agent Pendergast has battled immortal mad scientists, clones, his evil brother, sorta-zombies, sorta-demons, and an evil version of himself over the course of the series. However, his life isn’t just filled with monsters and weird science. He’s also made friends with a startling robust cast of supporting characters; two of whom are Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson, the main characters of this series.
Nora Kelly, however, has long predated this series. She was first introduced in a book called Thunderhead way back in 1999 which tied into the Pendergast series through adventure writer/journalist, Bill Smithback, who had appeared in the first Pendergast books, Relic and Reliquary. In that book, Nora ran afoul of a cult of killers who were given enhanced reflexes and strength due to ritual hallucinogen use and barely escaped with her and Bill’s lives. They also fell in love and Nora became a recurring character in the larger Pendergast series until Cemetery Dance.
Her present co-star, Corrie Swanson, also predates the Nora Kelly series. She was first introduced in Still Life with Crows when Pendergast takes a vacation to Pendergast and has to solve a bizarre set of ritual murders. She was a troubled teen who Pendergast took under his wing. Over the years, Pendergast supported her going to college and eventually becoming an FBI agent herself. She has been a recurring part of his series until she co-starred with him in White Fire and was made a main character in this series.
The Nora Kelly Series
The Nora Kelly series is composed of five books currently; Old Bones, The Scorpion’s Tail, Diablo Mesa, Dead Mountain, and Bad Lands. All-in-all, they are separately pretty okay books. Old Bones is by far the best of them and is ultimately a brilliant thriller surrounding weird murders taking place at the site of the Donner Party’s tragedy. If I was going to pick a favorite Pendergastverse book, Old Bones would probably be in my top three. Nora and Corrie are an immediately believable pair and they play off each other very well. Nora is the professional archaeologist with experience who plays good cop to Corrie’s young, brash demeanor. The mystery was also genuinely interesting and was a mystery that utilized both of their skills well.
The rest of the series has been more of a mixed bag. I’ll be honest, I’ve read The Scorpion’s Tail three times and if pressed on it still wouldn’t be able to tell you much about it. I know it involves treasure hunting, cold cases and nuclear bomb testing but beyond that there’s not a lot that I recall about it. Unfortunately, I recall much more about Dead Mountain which has a very similar premise involving treasure hunting, cold cases and nuclear bomb testing and somehow they waited a whole single book before retrying that premise. I disliked Dead Mountain in a way that is rare to me. I read a lot of books that aren’t great and they don’t bug me. Dead Mountain almost made me want to swear off Preston/Child’s books forever.
Yet, for some reason, I still came back for this one.
Bad Lands feels more like Thunderhead, the book that started it all for Nora Kelly. It involves weird religious cults, archaeology, and mysterious science. It used Nora and Corrie well and continued to highlight their differences and similarities nicely. There was weird archaeology for Nora to deal with and weird cold cases for Corrie to deal with. The villains were probably the most memorable of the Nora Kelly series so far and made for a fun antagonist for our heroes. The climax was a little wonky but compared to other books in the series, I’m not going to hold a grudge against it.
You’ll notice I skipped a book; Diablo Mesa. It’s not because I already wrote a review about it. Instead, I think Diablo Mesa fundamentally broke the series open in the same way that Bloodless, The Cabinet of Doctor Leng, and Angel of Vengeance did for the main Pendergast series. However, those books dealt with the implications of those world-shattering events and there hasn’t been a Pendergast book in over a year and as far as I know there isn’t another coming out in the near future due to those events.
What is this world shattering event you might ask?
There’s an alien invasion coming for Earth and our heroes learned about it at the end of the book.
And then never mentioned it again.
The Problem of Diablo Mesa (and all Subsequent Books)
What happens in the highest echelons of publishing has always mystified me, especially when it comes to big tentpole series like those written by Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Lee Child, and others. Preston/Child, as a pair, are near to the same level of those other writers even if their books have been given big screen adaptations yet or at least not since the very weird The Relic adaptation back in the 90s. I imagine that there comes a certain point where you are so successful that it’s less about quality and more about just getting another book out each year and honestly, that’s fair. What I wonder most about, though, is what sort of continuity guidelines are in place for these books. My theory is that the goal is less about continuity and more about each book being a good entry point into the series for a new reader thus hopefully ensuring that all the past volumes of the series will sell whenever someone finds the newest one on a bookshelf. Thus continuity ceases to matter and the books become just literary equivalents of superhero comics.
And that’s fine. I love Clive Cussler and Lee Child’s books. They let me turn off my brain and just enjoy some great popcorn thrillers. The difference between those books and Preston/Child’s books is that Dirk Pitt and Jack Reacher never discovered that an alien invasion was coming at the end of one book and then never mentioned it again. If I was to make a hypothesis, I would guess that there reason is that maybe that would be a hard thing to just create an unconnected book after that didn’t spoil at least that prior installment. And on a financial level, I get it. However, on a creative level, it annoys me so much. Preston/Child are great at writing cliffhangers. They’ve teased killing off Pendergast four or five times at the end of books and they somehow stuck the landing of whatever the heck happened in the Leng focused books that ended with Angel of Vengeance. They had all the tools in the world to be able to do the same with Diablo Mesa’s denouement and instead have never brought it back up.
There’s an alien invasion coming and Nora is dating the tech billionaire who also knows this is coming and they still have time to take a couple weeks off for a romantic rendezvous. Maybe an archaelogist and an FBI agent may feel out of their depths battling an alien invasion and that’s fine. I would gesticulate wildly towards the X-Files and say “Mulder and Scully at least tried” but maybe an FBI agent and a forensically trained archaeologist don’t see much that they have in common with those two. Or maybe I’d gesticulate wildly to the other series by the same authors where the main FBI agent just time traveled alongside his evil brother, a police detective, a butler, and immortal street urchin to try and alter the historical timeline. Alien invasion, honestly, isn’t QUITE as outlandish as that in my opinion but what do I know?
In all seriousness, I don’t really know what to do with this series at this point. For some reason, I keep coming back to Preston/Child’s books and enjoying most of them just as much as I did when I first picked up Relic in my high school library. In television, there’s a concept called ‘Jumping the Shark’ and it is the moment in a series where the writers resort to something that might be considered gimmicky or completely out of character to either raise stakes or maintain interest in a show. The Fonz literally jumped over a shark while on water skis. The X-Files killed off some of their most beloved side characters in an episode titled “Jump the Shark.” Over the years, lots of people have claimed that the Pendergast books have jumped the shark and while I can see their point, it never really bugged me. Even with weird mosquito monsters and time travel, I at least thought there was something interesting going on in those books. Honestly, the books that bugged me more were when the stakes dropped so low as to be pointless. I feel the converse with the Nora Kelly series. I definitely think Diablo Mesa was a shark jump and then instead of at least leaning into that, either the authors, editors or the publishers decided to never reference it again. I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t even considered that maybe the Nora Kelly series is being ghost-written while the Preston/Child are still working on the Pendergast books.
It bugs me endlessly and yet for some reason, I probably will still come back and read the next Nora Kelly book because there are moments where the comradery of Nora and Corrie is sooo good or the villain does something memorable and I feel like I did reading Relic back when I was fourteen and writing a letter to Preston/Child and telling them how much I loved that book. In all the years I’ve been an avid reader, the only other authors I’ve ever loved enough to do that was John Connolly, Chuck Wendig and Gareth Hanrahan via Bluesky.
In conclusion, I guess since this needs one, Bad Lands bugged me. Not because it was horrifyingly bad or anything but because for some reason a pair of authors who leaned into things like time travel and giant alien seeds submerged in the ocean decided to not lean into a future alien invasion two books earlier. Is it petty that that’s what bugs me most about this book? Maybe, I honestly don’t know. Ultimately, this series is just increasingly a “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” moment for me and yet I can’t find the motivation to set this series aside and, to use another cliche, say “it’s not you - it’s me.”