Angel of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on August 13, 2024

Each new Pendergast novel is sillier than the last, but I keep reading them. The series was more enjoyable when Aloysius Pendergast was an obnoxious, self-satisfied crime solver. I didn’t care much for Pendergast but I appreciated his acumen as a detective. Even after the appearance of Constance Greene — a woman who stopped aging in the nineteenth century and who might be even more annoying than Pendergast — I enjoyed the novels to the extent that they focused on a recognizable reality — i.e., a world without magic, supernatural apparitions, time travel, or similar silliness.

Silliness has now overtaken the series. I had hoped that her unrequited yearning for Pendergast would cause Constance to flee from his life, but Pendergast’s forbidden yearning for Constance keeps bringing them together. Constance’s latest effort to flee took her to the nineteenth century in a dimension nearly identical to the one that Pendergast inhabits (the one that seems to host the supernatural). The latest stories have replaced magic with time travel, which might be the same thing. So now Pendergast is chasing Constance through time. Really, can’t Pendergast go back to solving crimes in the present and do away with all these quasi-science fiction themes?

Pendergast has an evil brother named Diogenes and a law enforcement friend named Vincent D’Agosta. Both are trapped in the past with Pendergast, who chose not to heed Constance’s plea that he remain in his own century after she returned to the nineteenth — albeit in another dimension — to save her sister Mary from the evil Enoch Leng, another member of the Pendergast family. She might even save her alter-self (or Binky, as the childhood version of Constance is known in this dimension and perhaps in infinite others).

Leng is a doctor whose experiments in life extension resulted in the deaths of dozens of test subjects. In Constance’s timeline, Leng killed Mary by dissecting her while she was still alive. Constance’s plan is to save this version of Mary (and this version of her brother Joe, not to mention Binky) while obtaining vengeance. The story essentially continues the plot that began in The Cabinet of Dr. Leng.

Angel of Vengeance is more an action/adventure story than a crime mystery. I suspect that’s what many series fans want. I suspect those fans will be satisfied with the story. Its 19th century atmosphere echoes Dickens. Pendergast wears various disguises, characters are captured and rescued, fights break out from time to time (occasionally with knives because nineteenth century), buildings explode, people are poisoned, and so forth. The story is fun and moderately exciting but not surprising. Readers who enjoy the series will know what to expect. New readers might want to start with an earlier novel because Angel of Vengeance won’t be easy to digest for those who aren’t familiar with the backstory.

The novel’s ending might leave the door open for another time travel story. Why can’t the brilliant detective go back to solving bizarre crimes instead of hopping around the multiverse? Maybe he will. For now, I can confidently recommend Angel of Vengeance to Pendergast fans, although less enthusiastically than I would recommend books that are more tightly attached to the same part of the multiverse that I inhabit.

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