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.
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.
Over the course of the novel, the brothers' paths eventually cross nearly simultaneously in Honduras, after Vernon's teacher and three guides have all died from disease. Philip escapes from Hauser and his men after discovering their secret brutal nature (including an attempt, through bribery, to have the corrupt military kill Tom and Sally), and is found by his brothers nearly dead. Later, Hauser's men kill Pingo and Chori, and Don Alfonso himself succumbs to wounds sustained in a firefight. The three brothers and Sally are all nearly dead when they are rescued and nursed back to health by a lonely native named Borabay, who is revealed to be the true eldest son of Maxwell Broadbent, and the fourth brother, having been conceived when Maxwell had an affair with a native woman. Borabay leads them to a village inhabited by the Tara tribe. The Tara chief recalls how, decades earlier, Maxwell Broadbent had raided a large, mountaintop temple known as the White City (accessible only by a single rope bridge), and taking all of the treasure back to America with him. The chief reveals that after Maxwell returned to Honduras with the treasure, he requested to be buried with his treasure in the very White City that he raided. However, at his early funeral, the chief tricked him; instead of giving him poison to kill him, he gave him a drink that rendered him unconscious long enough for the treasure to be buried with him, before he eventually awoke inside the tomb. Thus, the Broadbents now have to recover the treasure and save their father.
Hauser and his men have already converged on the White City and begin dynamiting the area to find the right tomb. The Broadbents manage to find the right tomb, with a barely-alive Maxwell still inside. Hauser attacks them and fatally shoots Maxwell, but the five of them manage to escape to the rope bridge before being blocked in on both sides by Hauser's men. As Hauser himself approaches to kill them, Tom holds up a canteen full of gasoline and reveals that Sally is on a ridge hundreds of yards away with a sniper rifle, prepared to shoot the canteen and blow up the bridge. Hauser calls their bluff, but when he attempts to throw the canteen over the bridge, Sally successfully shoots it, setting Hauser on fire and eventually causing him to plummet to his death. The Broadbents all make it back across the bridge while the soldiers panic, with Sally and the Broadbent brothers killing half of the soldiers while the other half is trapped in the White City after the bridge breaks. All the surviving soldiers eventually starve to death.
Back in the Tara village, Maxwell is tended to as he dies of his injury, admitting that he would've died of the cancer even if he had survived the attack. He spends his final days reconciling with his sons, who all forgive him in return. He then agrees to the deal and splits the treasure between the sons, with each receiving roughly $100 million. Borabay is the one dissenter who does not wish to receive any of the treasure, instead simply asking for American citizenship and Maxwell's New Mexico estate to live in. Maxwell happily obliges his request, and then dies in peace. He is given a proper funeral by the Tara people, who have finally forgiven him.
In the epilogue, Lewis Skiba's company has gone bankrupt since the Codex was never brought to him, but Skiba finds himself strangely at peace since he was aware of Hauser's brutal methods, and is glad that Hauser failed. Similarly, Sally finds out about Clyve's deception, as Clyve is now being sued by the Swiss pharmaceutical company, claiming that he scammed them. The Codex, which was eventually found among the treasure, is studied by Sally and eventually published openly to the world, bringing in a new era of medicine and revolutionizing several disease treatments. Tom and Sally have fallen in love, and are eventually married. Tom starts his own veterinarian business, while Borabay begins enjoying the privileges of living in America.
Publishers Weekly called the work a "first-rate beach novel".
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.
Meanwhile, Ford goes into the desert to look for the dinosaur. At the same time, desperate to recover the notebook, Maddox kidnaps Tom Broadbent's wife, Sally. He takes her to an abandoned mine to use as a bargaining chip, forcing Tom to hand over the notebook. Now that Maddox has the notebook, however, he intends to kill Sally so he can not be identified. She manages to break free, Tom rescues her, and the two of them escape into the desert on foot, pursued by Maddox and his rifle.
Masago infiltrates the museum and kills Corvus, stealing the samples and his research. But Melodie, realizing previously that Corvus would try to steal the credit from her, had made copies of everything and hid them, along with more samples of the dinosaur. When she sees that he has been murdered and that his work is missing, she realizes she is the next likely target. Her only chance is to complete the research and post it to the Internet, so killing her would no longer serve the purposes of a cover-up. During her final research, she discovers that the 65-million-year-old Venus particles are still alive. They are a type of virus that destroys the cell structure of reptiles, evidently introduced to the earth by the Chicxulub meteorite. She posts her findings to the web to show the world.