Douglas Preston Books in Order

Douglas Preston is an American thriller and nonfiction author best known for the long-running FBI Agent Pendergast series, which he co-writes with Lincoln Child, a collaboration that began in 1995 with Relic. He spent seven years working as a writer and editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the same museum that gave him and Lincoln Child the idea for Relic, the first Pendergast novel, after they went on a midnight tour of the empty building. The series has been continued for more than two decades and over twenty books. Relic and The Cabinet of Curiosities were both selected by NPR readers as among the 100 greatest thrillers ever written, and their last twenty consecutive collaborative novels have been New York Times bestsellers. Douglas Preston has also received a shared Edgar Award and has served as President of the Authors Guild.

Douglas Preston also writes solo thrillers, including the Wyman Ford and the Cash & Colcord series, and has written over 10 nonfiction books, including The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017), about the discovery of a pre-Columbian city in the Honduran rainforest, which was #1 on the New York Times list.

This page lists all Douglas Preston books in order, including his collaborative work with Lincoln Child, his solo novels, short stories, and nonfiction books.

Latest Douglas Preston Books

More upcoming releases:

• Dead Man’s Journey (January 2027)

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How the Series Connect

The Pendergast and Nora Kelly series are part of the same common universe, share characters and have some reading overlap worth knowing about.

Nora Kelly appears as a recurring supporting character in the Pendergast series starting from The Cabinet of Curiosities (book 3) onward, and Corrie Swanson, who becomes the main partner in the Nora Kelly series, is introduced in Still Life With Crows (Pendergast series book 4). By the time the Nora Kelly series begins with Old Bones (2019), both characters are already a main part of the series and have a lot of background information and history from the Pendergast novels. The standalone novel Thunderhead (1999) features a younger Nora Kelly before either series existed, and it can be read as a prequel to the Nora Kelly series.

However, the Nora Kelly series stands on its own, so you don’t need the Pendergast books to follow it. But if you’ve read the Pendergast series, the character relationships in the Nora Kelly books will make more sense and feel more familiar.

The Gideon Crew, Wyman Ford, and Cash & Colcord series are entirely independent of each other and don’t have any of the characters or storylines in the Pendergast universe.

FBI Agent Pendergast Series (Books in Order)

The Pendergast series follows FBI Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast, a brilliant, eccentric, and unconventional investigator from a wealthy New Orleans family, as he solves cases that sit at the edge of crime, science, and the unexplained. He works mostly independently from the Bureau, showing up wherever his instincts take him, that is, usually where no one wants him and where the answers are never simple.

It has several recurring characters, NYPD’s Vincent D’Agosta, archaeologist Nora Kelly, and Pendergast’s ward Constance Greene, who become more important as the series goes on. Several books are split into story arcs (the Diogenes trilogy, the Helen trilogy, the Dr. Leng trilogy) where the next books are directly linked, so reading from Relic is strongly recommended.

For the full Pendergast reading order, see Pendergast Books in Order.

Co-authored with Lincoln Child.

1. Pendergast: The Beginning, 2026
2. Relic, 1995
3. Reliquary, 1997
4. The Cabinet of Curiosities, 2002
5. Still Life with Crows, 2003
6. Brimstone, 2004
7. Dance of Death, 2005
8. The Book of the Dead, 2007
9. The Wheel of Darkness, 2008
10. Cemetery Dance, 2009
11. Fever Dream, 2010
12. Cold Vengeance, 2011
13. Extraction, 2012
14. Two Graves, 2012
15. White Fire, 2013
16. Blue Labyrinth, 2014
17. Crimson Shore, 2015
18. The Obsidian Chamber, 2016
19. City of Endless Night, 2018
20. Verses for the Dead, 2018
21. Crooked River, 2020
22. Bloodless, 2021
23. The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, 2023
24. Angel of Vengeance, 2024

Reading notes:

• Pendergast: The Beginning is a novel set before the events of Relic but published much later.

Other Pendergast Books

• Aloysius X. L. Pendergast: Mysterious Profiles, 2023

Nora Kelly Series (Books in Order)

The Nora Kelly series follows museum archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson as they investigate crimes that have both historical and present-day elements. Nora Kelly brings field expertise; Corrie Swanson brings investigative authority. The two make an effective pair in cases where they encounter everything from old bones with no clear cause of death to deaths in the Badlands desert. The series is set primarily in the American Southwest and starts with Old Bones, although the earlier standalone novel Thunderhead has a younger Nora Kelly, thus it can be read as a prequel.

Co-authored with Lincoln Child.

1. Thunderhead, 1999
2. Old Bones, 2019
3. The Scorpion’s Tale, 2021
4. Diablo Mesa, 2022
5. Dead Mountain, 2023
6. Badlands, 2025
7. Dead Man’s Journey, 2027

Gideon Crew Series (Books in Order)

The Gideon Crew series follows scientist and former art thief Gideon Crew who works for a secretive intelligence organization that sends him on high-risk missions where Gideon, while using his high level of technical knowledge and expertise, he also disregards known risks and his personal safety. He knows he has a terminal illness, which removes most of the normal constraints on what he’s willing to risk. The standalone novel The Ice Limit connects to the Gideon Crew storyline in Beyond the Ice Limit, so reading The Ice Limit first is recommended.

Co-authored with Lincoln Child.

1. Gideon’s Sword, 2011
2. Gideon’s Corpse, 2012
3. The Lost Island, 2014
4. Beyond the Ice Limit, 2016
5. The Pharaoh Key, 2018

Wyman Ford Series (Books in Order)

The Wyman Ford series follows former CIA operative Wyman Ford, who takes on freelance intelligence assignments that are part espionage, science, and also morally complex. Wyman Ford is an ex-monk as well as an ex-spy, which gives him an unusual edge in the situations where official channels have already failed. The techno-thriller series has each book dealing with a different scientific threat, gene modification, energy, AI, each being investigated during a single mission.

1. Tyrannosaur Canyon, 2005
2. Blasphemy, 2008
3. Impact, 2010
4. The Kraken Project, 2014

Cash & Colcord Series (Books in Order)

The Cash & Colcord series follows CBI Agent Frances Cash and Sheriff James Colcord, who investigate strange cases at a Colorado resort which allows visitors to view extinct but now resurrected animals that were brought back to life with genetic manipulation. When people in the area are murdered, the killers might not be entirely human.

Co-authored with Aletheia Preston.

• Extinction, 2024
• Paradox, 2026

Standalone Novels

• Jennie, 1994
• Mount Dragon, 1996 (with Lincoln Child)
• Riptide, 1998 (with Lincoln Child)
• The Ice Limit, 2000 (with Lincoln Child)
• The Codex, 2003
• Fourteen Days, 2024

Novellas and Short Stories

• Gaslighted: Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast, 2014 (with Lincoln Child and R. L. Stine)
• Gone Fishing, 2017 (with Lincoln Child; features Vincent D’Agosta)

Short Story Collections and Anthologies

• Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, 2006 (edited by James Patterson)
• Gone Fishing and Other Stories, 2012
• FaceOff, 2014
• The Best True Crime Stories of the Year 2025, 2025 (author edited)

Non-Fiction Books

• Dinosaurs in the Attic, 1986
• Cities of Gold, 1992
• Talking to the Ground, 1995
• The Royal Road, 1998
• Ribbons of Time, 2006
• The Monster of Florence, 2008
• Trial by Fury, 2013
• The Black Place, 2014
• The Forgotten Killer, 2014
• The Lost City of the Monkey God, 2017
• The Lost Tomb, 2023

Douglas Preston Biography

Douglas Preston is a journalist and New York Times bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction books, best known for co-creating the long-running FBI Agent Pendergast series with Lincoln Child.
Author website: prestonchild.com

Jerome Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in Wellesley. He graduated in 1978 from Pomona College in Claremont, California with a degree in English literature, and that college later awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 2011.

His career started at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he worked between 1978 and 1985 as a writer, editor, and eventually manager of publications. That job was the inspiration for his first book, the nonfiction Dinosaurs in the Attic (1986), and introduced him to Lincoln Child, then an editor at St. Martin’s Press, as this meeting would forever change their lives. The two connected over a midnight tour Douglas Preston gave Lincoln Child of the empty museum, and the novel they eventually wrote from that experience was Relic (1995), the book that launched the bestselling Pendergast series.

Relic was adapted into a feature film by Paramount Pictures in 1997, though Pendergast himself didn’t appear in that version, much to all book fans’ disappointment. The novel and the sequel, Cabinet of Curiosities, were both chosen by NPR readers as among the 100 greatest thrillers ever written. Their last twenty novels in a row have immediately went up on the New York Times bestseller list, several reaching the #1 position.

Douglas Preston also wrote solo novels, including the Wyman Ford techno-thriller series and the Cash & Colcord series, co-authored with this daughter Aletheia Preston, and has published multiple nonfiction books that are based on his journalism career. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Smithsonian, on topics such as archaeology, paleontology, and exploration. His nonfiction book The Monster of Florence (2008), about an Italian serial killer case that got the authory into a legal controversy, was four months on the New York Times list. The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017), about the discovery of a prehistoric city in an unexplored Honduran valley, hit the well-deserved #1 on the list.

He was one of the early founders of International Thriller Writers and served as its Co-President. In 2014, he founded Authors United during a high-profile dispute between Amazon and publisher Hachette, which united hundreds of authors in protest. He has also served as President of the Authors Guild, and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has participated in USO tours supporting U.S. service members overseas, and was elected to the Long Riders Guild.

Awards received by Preston include a shared Edgar Award, the NPR Reader Award for Best Thriller (twice), the 2005 PCA National Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature and Popular Culture, and the 2012 Milan International Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award (Italy), among others.

Douglas Preston lives in New Mexico.

Douglas Preston Books Adaptations and TV Works

• The Relic – adapted into the film Relic (1997)
• Jennie – adapted into the TV movie The Jennie Project (2001)
• Superfire – TV movie (2002)
• The Lost City of the Monkey God – adapted into the TV documentary based on the non-fiction book The Lost City of the Monkey God (2018)

Douglas Preston Awards and Honors

Awards

• The Monster of Florence – Black Quill Awards for Dark Genre Book of Non-Fiction, Editors’ Choice (2008)
• Impact – New England Book Festival, science fiction category (2010)

Nominations and Shortlists

• The Ice Limit – Evergreen Book Award (2003)
• Still Life with Crows – Audie Awards nomination for Science-Fiction (2004)
• Brimstone – Audie Awards nomination for Mystery and Science-Fiction (2005)
• White Fire – International Thriller Writers Award, Best Hardcover Novel (2014)
• Blue Labyrinth – Audie Awards nomination for Thriller or Suspense (2016)
• Crimson Shore – Audie Awards nomination for Mystery (2017)
• The Lost City of the Monkey God – Goodreads Choice Award nomination (2017)
• The Scorpion’s Tail – Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Mystery (2022)
• Extinction – Goodreads Choice Award nomination (2024)
• The Lost Tomb – Goodreads Choice Award nomination (2024)

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