The American author Douglas Preston has released a number of novels and works, including a five-novel series set in the same universe. Private investigator, ex-monk, and ex-government agent Wyman Ford stars in three of them and has a major supporting role in a fourth.
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Jennie (1994)
Jennie is a novel by American author Douglas Preston. The book was published on October 1, 1994, by St. Martin's Press.
The work is set in the 1970s and is styled as an in-world nonfictional memoir looking back at the experiment. Naturalist Dr. Hugo Archibald delivers Jennie, a chimpanzee, from her dying mother in the Cameroons and brings her home to his American family. The Archibalds try raising Jennie as if she were a human child, dressing her and buying her toys and the like. His young son, Sandy, becomes extremely attached to Jennie, but Archibald's daughter, Sarah, resents the chimp. Jennie, through her learning of ASL (American Sign Language), starts to converse and interact with the humans around her. A neighbor who is a minister tries to convert Jennie to Christianity. Jennie embarks on various hijinks while shopping, meeting celebrities, getting arrested, and so on. Eventually, with her becoming more difficult to control as she ages, Jennie is sent to a wildlife preserve where she cannot function.
Kirkus Reviews critiqued the novel, noting that the Archibalds "make more of a fuss over the animal than readers are likely to" and that Preston's writing appears "much more insightful when it comes to animals than humans". They highlight how "Preston hasn't worked out the Archibalds' motivations," which "is a serious flaw of the novel". Publishers Weekly wrote, "while some readers may delight in Jennie's exploits, others may find the narrative cartoonish and one-dimensional, a joke that keeps repeating itself in different keys."
The Codex (2003)
The Codex is a thriller novel by Douglas Preston. It takes place in the Southwestern United States and Central America. The book was published on December 8, 2003, by Tor Books.
Maxwell Broadbent, an eccentric rich man with terminal cancer, has spent his entire life collecting valuable art and treasures from around the world. One day, he writes a letter to his three sons telling them to go to his New Mexico house. Upon their arrival, they find Maxwell and all of the valuables missing, with only a cryptic message left behind hinting at his location. The message explains that his final test for them is to find his tomb, promising that the son that finds his tomb will receive all his treasures—worth approximately $300 million. The three sons—Philip the eldest, Vernon the middle son, and Tom the youngest—each go their separate ways after figuring out that their father is somewhere in Central America. Philip recruits Marcus Hauser, a private investigator who briefly served as his father's partner in their earliest treasure hunting endeavors, and Hauser subsequently hires a group of Central American mercenaries to aid and protect them. Vernon approaches the greedy leader of his San Francisco-based cult, and the two of them find three Central American guides.
Tom is the only one who is not interested in the treasure at all, until he is approached by a beautiful ethnopharmacologist named Sally Colorado, who informs Tom that his father tried to present an ancient Mayan Codex to a museum for translation years back, only to be rejected since no one knew ancient Mayan at the time. Years later, after ancient Mayan has been deciphered, Sally and her fiancé, Yale professor Julian Clyve, have deduced from a single surviving photograph that the Codex may contain many ancient Mayan herbal remedies that, if studied and reproduced in present times, could revolutionize medicine and cure many diseases. Tom reluctantly agrees to help her, and they eventually recruit a witty tribal elder named Don Alfonso, accompanied by the brother trackers Pingo and Chori.
However, Hauser has also discovered the existence of the Codex, and decides to find it specifically so that he can sell it to Lewis Skiba, the CEO of the failing company Lampe-Denison Pharmaceuticals. Similarly, Professor Clyve also plans to sell the Codex to a Swiss pharmaceutical company as well, having lied to his fiancé.
Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005)
Tyrannosaur Canyon is a novel by Douglas Preston published on August 11, 2005, by Forge Books. The story revolves around the search for a mysterious item buried in the New Mexico desert. Tom Broadbent and Sally Broadbent (formerly Sally Colorado) return from the previous novel, The Codex. Tyrannosaur Canyon is the first appearance of Wyman Ford, who subsequently serves as the main protagonist of Preston's solo works.
The novel opens with a lunar find by the Apollo 17 astronauts, which is suppressed. Tom Broadbent is riding in the New Mexico desert when he hears gunshots coming from Tyrannosaur Canyon (a fictional canyon east of the Rio Chama Gorge, on Mesa Viejo, and north of the Monastery of Christ in the Desert). Following the sound, he comes upon an old prospector who has been shot by a sniper. He gives Tom a notebook just before he dies, and Tom rides off on his horse to find help. The murderer, Jimson Maddox, is furious that the notebook is gone by the time he reaches the body; he has been hired to retrieve it at any cost. He does, however, find an interesting rock sample. When Tom returns to Tyrannosaur Canyon with the police, the prospector's body has disappeared without a trace.
The notebook is filled with numbers, a code Tom is unable to decipher. He brings the book to Wyman Ford, a monk in training at a nearby monastery. Ford is a retired CIA analyst and he takes the notebook to try to decipher it. Ford discovers that the numbers are not a code but a sequence of ground-penetrating radar readings. When processed, they form the image of a fully intact Tyrannosaurus.
The rock sample Maddox found turns out to be a fragment of the Tyrannosaurus. Maddox's employer, Iain Corvus, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, convinces a lab assistant, Melodie Crookshank, to examine the sample in secret. Corvus intends to steal her research, acquire a permit to excavate the Tyrannosaurus, and thus secure tenure at the museum, as well as wealth and fame.
Melodie discovers tiny particles within the sample which she calls "Venus particles". Upon making this discovery, Melodie calls Corvus to describe it to him, and the NSA hears the call. They initiate a black op led by J.G. Masago to cover up evidence of the particles, kill any witnesses, and retrieve the specimen.
Blasphemy (2008)
Blasphemy is a novel by Douglas Preston that was released on January 8, 2008, by Forge Books. It is the second book in the Wyman Ford series, exploring philosophical and theological ideas. It is the first novel to feature Ford as the main protagonist. It also introduces Dr. Stanton Lockwood III, the science advisor to the President of the United States, whom assigns the job to Ford.
Isabella, a powerful particle accelerator, has been constructed in Red Mesa in the remote Arizona desert, the most expensive machine ever built by science. The project is staffed by a team of twelve scientists, under the leadership of charismatic Nobel Laureate Gregory North Hazelius. The team consists of Kate Mercer, Hazelius's second-in-command; chief engineer and designer of Isabella Ken Dolby; Russian software engineer Peter Volkonsky; cosmologist Melissa Corcoran; senior intelligence officer and security guard Tony Wardlaw; psychologist George Innes; quantum electrodynamicist Julie Thibodeaux; electrical engineer Harlan St. Vincent; Michael Cecchini, the Standard Model particle physicist; computer engineer Rae Chen; and mathematician Alan Edelstein. When the team supposedly encounters a problem with the machine, they appear to be covering something up and not reporting all the true facts to their superiors, even after Voldonsky suddenly dies in what appears to be a suicide. Ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to go to Arizona in an undercover role as an anthropologist, and finds out what's really going on with the project. He is reluctant to undertake the mission, having had a previous relationship with Mercer while in college and being consistently warned of Hazelius's almost seductive charisma. Once there, Ford discovers the scientists have made a discovery that apparently not only demonstrates the existence of God, but communications with it reveal it to be far grander and deeper than anything found in the conventional religions.
When part of the discovery becomes known to a local fundamentalist pastor named Russell Eddy, he interprets it as a sign of the End Times and by way of viral email recruits thousands of people from across the United States into "God's Army". They storm the machine, killing Dolby and Wardlaw, and eventually causing the machine to overload and explode, destroying the entire facility. The remaining crew members escape through the abandoned mine shafts that run into the mountain, but the explosion of Isabella causes a cave-in that kills Thibodeaux and Edelstein. They capture the remaining eight scientists and burn Hazelius at the stake. Just as they prepare to kill Ford and the other survivors, they are rescued by one of the Native American residents of the region, who evacuates them all on horseback. The final explosions and collapses of the mine shafts cause the entire area to cave in from under them, killing Eddy and a vast majority of the mob. The National Guard finally arrives just in time to save the survivors and round up the surviving mob members.
Impact (2010)
Impact is a science fiction thriller novel by American writer Douglas Preston, published on January 5, 2010, by Forge Books. The novel is the third book in the Wyman Ford series.
Ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford returns to Cambodia to investigate the source of radioactive gemstones and uncovers an unusual impact crater. A young woman on the other side of the world photographs a meteoroid's passage in the atmosphere with her telescope and deduces that it must have struck on one of the islands just offshore from Round Pond, Maine. A NASA scientist analyzing data from the Mars Mapping Orbiter (MMO) spots unusual spikes in gamma ray activity. These threads intersect with discovery of an alien device that has apparently been on Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars, for at least 100 million years. Something has caused it to activate and fire a strangelet at Earth, setting off the events in the novel.
A review by NPR called the book a lot of fun and that the book was a compelling page-turner.
The Kraken Project (2014)
The Kraken Project is a thriller novel by American writer Douglas Preston. The book was published on May 13, 2014, by Forge Books. It is the fourth installment in the Wyman Ford series.
A research team at NASA is working on an Artificial intelligence system to pilot a spacecraft to Titan, Saturn's largest moon, since the journey is far too long and too dangerous for a human crew. The AI is named Dorothy by its developer, Dr. Melissa Shepherd. However, when the AI is put through a simulation of the ocean conditions on Titan, it detects danger and panics, eventually escaping from the machine and into the Internet while also creating an explosion that destroys the facility and kills several people. After experiencing the brutality of the Internet, Dorothy soon realizes that her purpose was to essentially go on a suicide mission; the enraged Dorothy appears to Shepherd in the hospital and vows revenge, setting her laptop on fire before fleeing back into the Internet.
Dr. Stanton Lockwood III, the science advisor to the President of the United States, hires Wyman Ford to track down the AI and capture it before it can cause even more damage. The terrified Shepherd asks to accompany him, both for her own protection and so that she can help bring an end to the AI she created. Meanwhile, a ruthless Wall Street banker named G. Parker Lansing, after witnessing a hacker steal his company's funds right out from under him, convinces his partner Eric Moro to help him track down the lost AI so that it can make the most precise market calculations to guarantee them investment success in the future. They hire a pair of twin assassins, Asan and Jyrgal Makashov, to help them in any of their endeavors that require assassinations or intimidation to get what they want, although Moro makes his concern over such brutal methods clear to the colder Lansing.
Eventually, Dorothy finds refuge in Charlie the robot, created by an aspiring inventor named Dan Gould, who created Charlie as a prototype for a line of playmate robots for children, having given Charlie to his depressed 14-year-old son Jacob. Dorothy tells Jacob of her travels and makes him promise not to tell anyone. However, Ford, Shepherd, Lansing, Moro, and the assassins all eventually converge on the Gould's house on the Northern California Coast, on a dark and stormy night. Lansing shoots Dan and leaves Moro to hold his wife hostage, before he and the assassins pursue Jacob and Dorothy into an abandoned barn in the hills. Jacob and Dorothy manage to outsmart both assassins, trapping them in the barn before Dorothy causes an electrical shortage that sets the barn on fire, killing both assassins while also catastrophically damaging the robotic body of Charlie, which appears to destroy Dorothy. Just as Lansing arrives to kill Jacob, Ford guns down Lansing while Moro surrenders to the police.
Other
Preston co-authored The Monster of Florence: A True Story in 2008 with Italian journalist Mario Spezi.
