Diablo Mesa
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4.1 • 53 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times bestsellers Preston and Child, archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson are tasked with the mysterious deaths of two people found at a site where a UFO allegedly crashed decades before.
Lucas Tappan, a wealthy and eccentric billionaire and founder of Icarus Space Systems, approaches the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute with an outlandish proposal—to finance a careful, scientific excavation of the Roswell Incident site, where a UFO is alleged to have crashed in 1947. A skeptical Nora Kelly, to her great annoyance, is tasked with the job.
Nora's excavation immediately uncovers two murder victims buried at the site, faces and hands obliterated with acid to erase their identities. Special Agent Corrie Swanson is assigned to the case. As Nora’s excavation proceeds, uncovering things both bizarre and seemingly inexplicable, Corrie’s homicide investigation throws open a Pandora's box of espionage and violence, uncovering bloody traces of a powerful force that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets—and that threatens to engulf them all in an unimaginable fate.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Suspense masters Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child take us to the mysterious town of Roswell, New Mexico, in this taut extraterrestrial thriller. When a charismatic Elon Musk–type billionaire invites acclaimed archeologist Nora Kelly to run a dig near the infamous UFO-crash location, the idea sounds wacko—but she can’t afford to turn it down. But when two bodies from the 1940s are unearthed, the dig takes a sharp turn into far more serious territory. As Nora works to untangle a web of lies alongside FBI agent Corrie Swanson and a troupe of colorful characters (like the diehard, slightly disheveled astronomer and alien researcher Noam Bitam), we’re pulled headfirst into the suspense. A fun installment in Preston & Child’s Nora Kelly series that works brilliantly on its own, Diablo Mesa is an exciting and unputdownable read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestsellers Preston and Child go full X-Files in their excellent third thriller featuring archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI agent Corrie Swanson (after 2021's The Scorpion's Tail). When Nora's boss at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute asks her to direct excavations at Roswell, N.Mex., the site of a supposed UFO crash in 1947, she quits, refusing to be part of a project that would make the institute a laughingstock and harm her career. The billionaire funding the project later persuades Nora to work for him directly, though she insists on first checking the accuracy of a recent aerial survey that detected evidence of human remains at the site. The subsequent discovery of two decades-old corpses, with bullet wounds in their skulls and burned-off features, involves Corrie, a skilled forensic anthropologist with a talent for facial reconstruction, and proves the precursor to more puzzles, including a baffling 1999 locked-room murder of a nuclear scientist and possible proof that what crashed at Roswell was not from Earth. The taut suspense and tight plotting that marked the authors' earliest Pendergast novels are very much in evidence. Fans of kick-ass female leads will be delighted.
