Book Review: Cemetery Dance

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, Orion Books, 2009

A New York Times reporter is brutally murdered in his own apartment, with eyewitness testimony and CCTV footage indicating that the killer was a neighbour. An open-and-shut case? Not when the neighbour was reported as dead and buried weeks earlier. As FBI Special Agent Pendergast and NYPD Lieutenant D'Acosta are thrown together once again to investigate the case, they begin to uncover apparent links between a series of killings going back well over a century, a reclusive cult occupying a local derelict farmstead, and...voodoo? As shadowy, corpselike figures begin to stalk our protagonists, Pendergast and D'Acosta will very quickly need to work out how one is supposed to stop a killer who's already dead.

Cemetery Dance is another in Preston and Child's loosely-linked series of action-thrillers featuring Pendergast and D'Acosta, who first appeared together in the similarly horror-themed The Relic (1994). The novel kicks along at a cracking pace, with escalating tension and plenty of cliffhangers to keep fans of the action-thriller blockbuster happy, plus a major dose of supernatural horror to satisfy the cravings of genre fans. While the plot occasionally suffers from the 'over-the-top' syndrome that many thrillers do nowadays, on the whole this is a thoroughly engrossing, exciting and creepy romp that should keep readers guessing right up until the final acts. An extremely fun read.