LXII

I read the primrose and the sea

and remember nothing

I read Arcturus and the snow

and remember nothing

I read the green and white book of spring

and remember nothing

I read the hatred in a man’s eye

Lord, I remember nothing.

Scorn spat at me and spoke

I remember it not

The river was frozen round the ship

I remember it not

I found a secret message in a blade of grass

and it is forgotten

I called my lovers by their sweet names

they are all forgotten.

Where are my lovers now?

buried in me.

The blades of grass, the ships, the scorners?

here in me

The haters in the spring, snow and Arcturus?

here in me

The primrose and the sea?

here in me.

I know what humans know

no less no more

I know how the summer breaks

on Neptune’s shore

I know how winter freezes

the Milky Way

My heart’s home is in Limbo

and there I stay.

Praise Limbo, heart, and praise

forgetfulness

We know what the tiger knows

no more no less

We know what the primrose thinks

and think it too

We walk when the snail walks

across the dew.

I was a rash man in my time

but now I am still

I spoke with god’s voice once

now I am still

Evil made my right hand strong

which now is still

Wisdom gave me pride once,

but it is still.

Lie down poor heart at last

and have your rest

Remember to forget

and have your rest

Think of yourself as once you were

at your best

And then lie down alone

and have your rest.

These things are as time weaves them

on his loom

Forgot, forgetting, we survive not

mortal bloom

Let us give thanks, to space,

for a little room

Space is our face and time our death

two poles of doom

Come dance around the compass

pointing north

Before, face downward, frozen,

we go forth.

LXIII

Thus systole addressed diastole,—

The heart contracting, with its grief of burden,

To the lax heart, with grief of burden gone.

Thus star to dead leaf speaks; thus cliff to sea;

And thus the spider, on a summer’s day,

To the bright thistledown, trapped in the web.

No language leaps this chasm like a lightning:

Here is no message of assuagement, blown

From Ecuador to Greenland; here is only

A trumpet blast, that calls dead men to arms;

The granite’s pity for the cloud; the whisper

Of time to space. 

Poet, short story writer, critic and novelist, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) has been called the most metaphysical, the most learned, and the most modern of poets. With writing that reflects an intense interest in psychological, philosophical, and scientific issues, Aiken remains a unique influence upon modern writers and critics today. In his lifetime, Aiken received many awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1930 and the National Book Award for Poetry in 1954. He served as the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1950-1952.

Selected Poems contains Aiken's own choice of the best and most representative of his poems, spanning more than forty years of his work. Harold Bloom has contributed a new Foreword to reintroduce Aiken to a new generation of readers. The inclusion of several pivotal poems from previous editions broadens the scope of the work to represent Aiken's legacy.

NAMED A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017

#1 New York Times and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller!

A Best Book of 2017 from the Boston Globe

One of the 12 Best Books of the Year from National Geographic

Included in Lithub's Ultimate Best Books of 2017 List

A Favorite Science Book of 2017 from Science News

A five-hundred-year-old legend. An ancient curse. A stunning medical mystery. And a pioneering journey into the unknown heart of the world's densest jungle.

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God-but then committed suicide without revealing its location.

Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.

Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.

Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Relic: The #1 New York Times bestselling thriller by Douglas Preston's and Lincoln Child, with more than one million copies sold to date

Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human...

But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.

Museum researcher Margo Green must find out who--or what--is doing the killing. But can she do it in time to stop the massacre?

A TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE

After a harrowing, otherworldly confrontation on the shores of Exmouth, Massachusetts, Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is missing, presumed dead.

A SHOCKING RETURN

Sick with grief, Pendergast's ward, Constance, retreats to her chambers beneath the family mansion at 891 Riverside Drive--only to be taken captive by a shadowy figure from the past.

AN INTERNATIONAL MANHUNT

Proctor, Pendergast's longtime bodyguard, springs to action, chasing Constance's kidnapper through cities, across oceans, and into wastelands unknown.

BUT IN A WORLD OF BLACK AND WHITE, NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS

And by the time Proctor discovers the truth, a terrifying engine has stirred-and it may already be too late . 

Documents the author's discovery that his new family home in Florence had been the scene of a double murder, his relationship with the investigative journalist co-author, and how they both became targets of the police investigation into the murders.

Reliquary is the smash hit second book in the Pendergast series, from New York Times bestselling authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Hidden deep beneath Manhattan lies a warren of tunnels, sewers, and galleries, mostly forgotten by those who walk the streets above. There lies the ultimate secret of the Museum Beat. When two grotesquely deformed skeletons are found deep in the mud off the Manhattan shoreline, museum curator Margo Green is called in to aid the investigation. Margo must once again team up with police lieutenant D'Agosta and FBI agent Pendergast, as well as the brilliant Dr. Frock, to try and solve the puzzle. The trail soon leads deep underground, where they will face the awakening of a slumbering nightmare... in Reliquary, from bestselling coauthors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

"A consistently exciting and never predictable series."--Associated Press

When Grace Ozmian, the beautiful and reckless daughter of a wealthy tech billionaire, first goes missing, the NYPD assumes she has simply sped off on another wild adventure. Until the young woman's body is discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Queens, the head nowhere to be found.

Lieutenant CDS Vincent D'Agosta quickly takes the lead. He knows his investigation will attract fierce scrutiny, so D'Agosta is delighted when FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast shows up at the crime scene assigned to the case. "I feel rather like Brer Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch," Pendergast tells D'Agosta, "because I have found you here, in charge. Just like when we first met, back at the Museum of Natural History."

But neither Pendergast nor D'Agosta are prepared for what lies ahead. A diabolical presence is haunting the greater metropolitan area, and Grace Ozmian was only the first of many victims to be murdered . . . and decapitated. Worse still, there's something unique to the city itself that has attracted the evil eye of the killer.

As mass hysteria sets in, Pendergast and D'Agosta find themselves in the crosshairs of an opponent who has threatened the very lifeblood of the city. It'll take all of Pendergast's skill to unmask this most dangerous foe-let alone survive to tell the tale.

A secret chamber.
A mysterious shipwreck.
A murder in the desolate salt marshes.

A seemingly straightforward private case turns out to be much more complicated-and sinister-than Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast ever could have anticipated.

Pendergast, together with his ward Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton. 

Pendergast and Constance soon learn that Exmouth is a town with a very dark and troubled history, and this skeleton may be only the first hint of an ancient transgression, kept secret all these years. But they will discover that the sins of the past are still very much alive. Local legend holds that during the 1692 witch trials in Salem, the real witches escaped, fleeing north to Exmouth and settling deep in the surrounding salt marshes, where they continued to practice their wicked arts. Then, a murdered corpse turns up in the marshes. The only clue is a series of mysterious carvings. Could these demonic symbols bear some relation to the ancient witches' colony, long believed to be abandoned?

A terrible evil lurks beneath the surface of this sleepy seaside town-one with deep roots in Exmouth's grim history. And it may be that Constance, with her own troubled past, is the only one who truly comprehends the awful danger that she, Pendergast, and the residents of Exmouth must face . . . 

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered. Inside are thirty-six bodies all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago. While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city. The nightmare has begun. Again.

Special Agent Pendergast-one of the most original, compelling characters in all of contemporary fiction-returns in Preston and Child's new exhilarating novel 

BLUE LABYRINTH

A long-buried family secret has come back to haunt Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.

It begins with murder. One of Pendergast's most implacable, most feared enemies is found on his doorstep, dead. Pendergast has no idea who is responsible for the killing, or why the body was brought to his home. The mystery has all the hallmarks of the perfect crime, save for an enigmatic clue: a piece of turquoise lodged in the stomach of the deceased.

The gem leads Pendergast to an abandoned mine on the shore of California's Salton Sea, which in turn propels him on a journey of discovery deep into his own family's sinister past. But Pendergast learns there is more at work than a ghastly episode of family history: he is being stalked by a subtle killer bent on vengeance over an ancient transgression. And he soon becomes caught in a wickedly clever plot, which leaves him stricken in mind and body, and propels him toward a reckoning beyond anything he could ever have imagined....

A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground.

Is it a serial killer, a man with the need to destroy?

Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land?

Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America's heartland.

No one is safe.

Past and present collide as Special Agent Pendergast uncovers mysterious connections between a string of 19th century bear attacks in a Colorado mining town, a fabled, long-lost Sherlock Holmes story, and a deadly present-day arsonist.

In 1876, in a mining camp called Roaring Fork in the Colorado Rockies, eleven miners were killed by a rogue grizzly bear. Corrie Swanson has arranged to examine the miners' remains. When she makes a shocking discovery, town leaders try to stop her from exposing their community's dark and bloody past.

Just as Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI arrives to rescue his protege, the town comes under siege by a murderous arsonist who-with brutal precision-begins burning down multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside. Drawn deeper into the investigation, Pendergast discovers a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story that may be the key to solving both the mystery of the long-dead miners and the modern-day killings as well.

Now, with the ski resort snowed in and under savage attack-and Corrie's life suddenly in grave danger-Pendergast must solve the enigma of the past before the town of the present goes up in flames.

An FBI agent, rotting away in a high-security prison for a murder he did not commit...

His brilliant, psychotic brother, about to perpetrate a horrific crime...

A young woman with an extrodinary past, on th edge of a violent breakdown...

An ancient Egyptian tomb with an enigmatic curse, about to be unveiled at a celebrity-studded New York gala...

Memento Mori

Two brothers.

One a top FBI agent.

The other a brilliant, twisted criminal.

An undying hatred between them.

Now, a perfect crime.

And the ultimate challenge:

Stop me if you can...

About the Author

The thrillers of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child "stand head and shoulders above their rivals" (Publishers Weekly). Preston and Child's Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities were chosen by readers in a National Public Radio poll as being among the one hundred greatest thrillers ever written, and Relic was made into a number-one box office hit movie. They are coauthors of the famed Pendergast series and their recent novels include Fever Dream, Cold Vengeance, Two Graves, and Gideon's Corpse. In addition to his novels, Preston writes about archaeology for the New Yorker and Smithsonian magazines. Lincoln Child is a former book editor who has published five novels of his own, including the huge bestseller Deep Storm.
Readers can sign up for The Pendergast File, a monthly "strangely entertaining note" from the authors, at their website, PrestonChild.com. The authors welcome visitors to their alarmingly active Facebook page, where they post regularly.

BEYOND THE ICE LIMIT

That thing is growing again. We must destroy it. The time to act is now...

With these words begins Gideon Crew's latest, most dangerous, most high-stakes assignment yet. Failure will mean nothing short of the end of humankind on earth.

Five years ago, the mysterious and inscrutable head of Effective Engineering Solutions, Eli Glinn, led a mission to recover a gigantic meteorite--the largest ever discovered--from a remote island off the coast of South America. The mission ended in disaster when their ship, the Rolvaag, foundered in a vicious storm in the Antarctic waters and broke apart, sinking-along with its unique cargo-to the ocean floor. One hundred and eight crew members perished, and Eli Glinn was left paralyzed.

But this was not all. The tragedy revealed something truly terrifying: the meteorite they tried to retrieve was not, in fact, simply a rock. Instead, it was a complex organism from the deep reaches of space.

Now, that organism has implanted itself in the sea bed two miles below the surface-and it is growing. If it is not destroyed, the planet will be doomed. There is only one hope: for Glinn and his team to annihilate it, a task which requires Gideon's expertise with nuclear weapons. But as Gideon and his colleagues soon discover, the "meteorite" has a mind of its own-and it has no intention of going quietly...

A body is found in the attic of a fabulous Long Island estate.

There is a claw print scorched into the wall, and the stench of sulfur chokes the air.

When FBI Special Agent Pendergast investigates the gruesome crime, he discovers that thirty years ago four men conjured something unspeakable.

Has the devil come to claim his due?

Some things can't be undone.

Yesterday, Special Agent Pendergast still mourned the loss of his beloved wife, Helen, who died in a tragic accident in Africa twelve years ago.

Today, he discovers she was murdered.

Tomorrow, he will learn her most guarded secrets, leaving him to wonder: Who was the woman I married? Why was she murdered? And, above all . . . Who murdered her?

FEVER DREAM

Revenge is not sweet: It is essential.

After his wife, Helen, is brazenly abducted before his eyes, Special Agent Pendergast furiously pursues the kidnappers, chasing them across the country and into Mexico. But then, things go terribly, tragically wrong; the kidnappers escape; and a shattered Pendergast retreats to his New York apartment and shuts out the world.

But when a string of bizarre murders erupts across several Manhattan hotels-perpetrated by a boy who seems to have an almost psychic ability to elude capture-NYPD Lieutenant D'Agosta asks his friend Pendergast for help. Reluctant at first, Pendergast soon discovers that the killings are a message from his wife's kidnappers. But why a message? And what does it mean?

When the kidnappers strike again at those closest to Pendergast, the FBI agent, filled anew with vengeful fury, sets out to track down and destroy those responsible. His journey takes him deep into the trackless forests of South America, where he ultimately finds himself face to face with an old evil that-rather than having been eradicated-is stirring anew... and with potentially world-altering consequences.

Confucius once said: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, first dig two graves." Pendergast is about to learn the hard way just how true those words still ring.

A luxury ocean liner on its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic, awash in wealth and decadence...

An ancient Tibetan box, its contents unknown, sealed with a terrifying warning...

An FBI agent destined to confront what he fears most--himself...

This riveting true story recounts the authors journey on horseback across Arizona and New Mexico, retracing Coronados desperate search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. First published in 1992 and now available only from UNM Press, this classic adventure tale reveals the Southwest as it was when Europeans first saw it and shows how much, and how little, it has changed. The great myth of the American West, Preston writes, is that there was a winning of it.

Devastated by the discovery that his wife, Helen, was murdered, Special Agent Pendergast must have retribution. But revenge is not simple. As he stalks his wife's betrayers--a chase that takes him from the wild moors of Scotland to the bustling streets of New York City and the darkest bayous of Louisiana--he is also forced to dig further into Helen's past. And he is stunned to learn that Helen may have been a collaborator in her own murder.

Peeling back the layers of deception, Pendergast realizes that the conspiracy is deeper, goes back generations, and is more monstrous than he could have ever imagined--and everything he's believed, everything he's trusted, everything he's understood . . . may be a horrific lie.

Pendergast--the world's most enigmatic FBI Special Agent--returns to New York City to investigate a murderous cult. 

William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, are brutally attacked in their apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Eyewitnesses claim, and the security camera confirms, that the assailant was their strange, sinister neighbor--a man who, by all reports, was already dead and buried weeks earlier. While Captain Laura Hayward leads the official investigation, Pendergast and Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta undertake their own private--and decidedly unorthodox--quest for the truth. Their serpentine journey takes them to an enclave of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive, reclusive cult of Obeah and vodou which no outsiders have ever survived.

Gideon Crew--brilliant scientist, master thief--is living on borrowed time. When his mysterious employer, Eli Glinn, gives him an eyebrow-raising mission, he has no reason to refuse. Gideon's task: steal a page from the priceless Book of Kells, now on display in New York City and protected by unbreakable security. 

Accomplishing the impossible, Gideon steals the parchment--only to learn that hidden beneath the gorgeously illuminated image is a treasure map dating back to the time of the ancient Greeks. As they ponder the strange map, they realize that the treasure it leads to is no ordinary fortune. It is something far more precious: an amazing discovery that could perhaps even save Gideon's life.

Together with his new partner, Amy, Gideon follows a trail of cryptic clues to an unknown island in a remote corner of the Caribbean Sea. There, off the hostile and desolate Mosquito Coast, the pair realize the extraordinary treasure they are hunting conceals an even greater shock-a revelation so profound that it may benefit the entire human race . . . if Gideon and Amy can survive.

Introducing Gideon Crew: trickster, prodigy, master thief

GIDEON'S SWORD

At twelve, Gideon Crew witnessed his father, a world-class mathematician, accused of treason and gunned down.

At twenty-four, summoned to his dying mother's bedside, Gideon learned the truth: His father was framed and deliberately slaughtered. With her last breath, she begged her son to avenge him.

Now, with a new purpose in his life, Gideon crafts a one-time mission of vengeance, aimed at the perpetrator of his father's destruction. His plan is meticulous, spectacular, and successful.

But from the shadows, someone is watching. A very powerful someone, who is impressed by Gideon's special skills. Someone who has need of just such a renegade.

For Gideon, this operation may be only the beginning . . .

A top nuclear scientist goes mad and takes an innocent family hostage at gunpoint, killing one and causing a massive standoff. 

A plume of radiation above New York City leads to a warehouse where, it seems, a powerful nuclear bomb was assembled just hours before.

Sifting through the evidence, authorities determine that the unthinkable is about to happen: in ten days, a major American city will be vaporized by a terrorist attack.

Ten days. And Gideon Crew, tracking the mysterious terrorist cell from the suburbs of New York to the mountains of New Mexico, learns the end may be something worse--far worse--than mere Armageddon. 

Nora Kelly, a young archaeologist in Santa Fe, receives a letter written sixteen years ago, yet mysteriously mailed only recently. In it her father, long believed dead, hints at a fantastic discovery that will make him famous and rich---the lost city of an ancient civilization that suddenly vanished a thousand years ago. Now Nora is leading an expedition into a harsh, remote corner of Utah's canyon country. Searching for her father and his glory, Nora begins t unravel the greatest riddle of American archaeology. but what she unearths will be the newest of horrors...

The largest known meteorite has been discovered, entombed in the earth for millions of years on a frigid, desolate island off the southern tip of Chile. At four thousand tons, this treasure seems impossible to move. New York billionaire Palmer Lloyd is determined to have this incredible find for his new museum. Stocking a cargo ship with the finest scientists and engineers, he builds a flawless expedition. But from the first approach to the meteorite, people begin to die. A frightening truth is about to unfold: The men and women of the Rolvaag are not taking this ancient, enigmatic object anywhere. It is taking them.

From Publishers Weekly

The summer-beach reader has few better friends than Preston and Child, who, beginning with Relic (1995), have produced one (generally) smart and suspenseful thriller after another, most recently Thunderhead. Their new novel, which, like its predecessors, skirts the edge of science fiction, is their most expertly executed (though not most imaginative) entertainment yet. Its concept is high and simple: a scientific expedition plans to dig out and transport to New York harbor the mother of all meteorites from its resting spot on an icy island offshore Chile. The mission is nearly impossible: not only will the meteorite be the heaviest object ever moved by humanity, but the Chileans, if they learn of the mission, may decimate it in order to keep the meteorite. Six strong if broadly drawn characters propel the premise into action. There's bullheaded billionaire Palmer Lloyd, who funds the expedition, and three (of the many) people he hires to get the rock: world-class meteorite-hunter Sam McFarlane, disgraced for his obsession about possible interstellar meteorites; Captain Britton, disgraced alcoholic skipper hired to ferry the meteorite to the U.S.; and Eli Glinn, cold-blooded mastermind of an engineering firm dedicated to getting incredible jobs done, this one at the price of $300 million. There's Commandante Vallenar, a Chilean naval officer exiled to his nation's southern wastes, who will stop at nothing to defend Chile's honor and property. Finally, there's the meteorite, blood red, impossibly dense, possessed of strange and dangerous properties. Like the premise, the plot is simple, traversing a near-linear narrative that sustains serious tension as the expedition travels to Chile, digs out the meteorite and heads homeward, only to face both Vallenar and a ferocious storm. What the novel lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in athleticism: this is a big-boned thriller, one that will make a terrific summer movie as well as a memorable hot-day read.  
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From celebrated Relic author Douglas Preston, Wyman Ford races to stop a rogue AI in The Kraken Project, a New York Times bestselling thriller “as chilling as it is provocative" --James Rollins

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, a methane sea on Titan, where it will embark on a journey of exploration. But things at Goddard go awry, and the AI program in the probe called "Dorothy" flees to the internet. Former CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to track down the software with the help of Dorothy's creator, Melissa Shepherd. As they trace Dorothy in cyberspace, they realize horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her―and they learn she's being pursued by a pair of Wall Street high-frequency traders who want to turn her into an algorithmic-trading slave-bot.

Traumatized and angry, Dorothy jumps out of the Internet into a child's toy robot to hide. But is she bent on doing good―or on wiping out the human race?

This edition of the book is the deluxe, tall rack mass market paperback.

Mount Dragon: an enigmatic research complex hidden in the vast desert of New Mexico. Guy Carson and Susana Cabeza de Vaca have come to Mount Dragon to work shoulder to shoulder with some of the greatest scientific minds on the planet. Led by visionary genius Brent Scopes, their secret goal is a medical breakthrough that promises to bring incalculable benefits to the human race. But while Scopes believes he is leading the way to a new world order, he may in fact be opening the door to mass human extinction. And when Guy and Susana attempt to stop him they find themselves locked in a frightening battle with Scopes, his henchmen, and the apocalyptic nightmare that science has unleashed . . . in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Mount Dragon.

In Douglas Preston's Impact, Wyman Ford is tapped for a secret expedition to Cambodia... to locate the source of strangely beautiful gemstones that do not appear to be of this world.

A brilliant meteor lights up the Maine coast... and two young women borrow a boat and set out for a distant island to find the impact crater.

A scientist at the National Propulsion Facility discovers an inexplicable source of gamma rays in the outer Solar System. He is found decapitated, the data missing.

High resolution NASA images reveal an unnatural feature hidden in the depths of a crater on Mars... and it appears to have been activated.

Sixty hours and counting.

Dinosaurs in the Attic is a chronicle of the expeditions, discoveries, and scientists behind the greatest natural history collection every assembled. Written by former Natural History columnist Douglas J. Preston, who worked at the American Museum of Natural History for seven years, this is a celebration of the best-known and best-loved museum in the United States.

"Greetings from the dead," declares Maxwell Broadbent on the videotape he left behind after his mysterious disappearance. A notorious treasure hunter and tomb robber, Broadbent accumulated over a half a billion dollars' worth of priceless art, gems, and artifacts before vanishing---along with his entire collection---from his mansion in New Mexico.

At first, robbery is suspected, but the truth proves far stranger: As a final challenge to his three sons, Broadbent has buried himself and his treasure somewhere in the world, hidden away like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. If the sons wish to claim their fabulous inheritance, they must find their father's carefully concealed tomb.

The race is on, but the three brothers are not the only ones competing for the treasure. This secret is so astounding it cannot be kept quiet for long. With half a billion dollars at stake, as well as an ancient Mayan codex that may hold a cure for cancer and other deadly diseases, others soon join the hunt---and some of them will stop at nothing to claim the grave goods.

The bestselling coauthor of such page-turning thrillers as Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities, Douglas Preston now spins an unforgettable tale of greed, adventure, and betrayal in The Codex.