Douglas Preston Books In Order – Complete List

Douglas Preston is a New York Times bestselling author known for his collaboration with Lincoln Child in creating the wonderful and unforgettable paranormal thriller series, Aloysius Pendergast.

Here are the Douglas Preston books in order for his series and standalone novels, alone and in cooperation with Lincoln Child.

Latest Douglas Preston Books

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FBI Agent Pendergast Books in Publication Order

with Lincoln Child

Aloysius Pendergast is the main FBI Agent featured in the entire series

1. Relic (#1), 1995
2. Reliquary (2), 1997
3. The Cabinet of Curiosities (#3), 2002
4. Still Life with Crows (#4), 2003
5. Brimstone, (Pendergast #5, Diogenes #1) 2004
6. Dance of Death (Pendergast #6, Diogenes #2), 2005
7. The Book of the Dead (Pendergast #7, Diogenes #3), 2007
8. The Wheel of Darkness (#8), 2008
9. Cemetery Dance (#9), 2009
10. Fever Dream (#10), 2010
11. Cold Vengeance (#11), 2011
12. Two Graves (#12), 2012
13. Extraction (#12.5), 2012
14. White Fire (#13), 2013
15. Blue Labyrinth (#14), 2014
16. Crimson Shore (#15), 2015
17. The Obsidian Chamber (#16), 2016
18. City of Endless Night (#17), 2018
19. Verses for the Dead (#18), 2018
20. Crooked River (#19), 2020
21. Bloodless (#20), 2021
22. The Cabinet of Dr. Leng (#21), 2023
23. Angel of Vengeance (#22), 2024

FBI Agent Pendergast Short Stories

• Extraction, 2012

Other Pendergast Books

• Aloysius X. L. Pendergast (part of the Mysterious Profiles)

Nora Kelly Books in Publication Order

with Lincoln Child

Originally known as William Smithback’s wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archaeologist, got her own series after becoming more and more popular in the original Pendergast novels.

1. Old Bones, 2019
2. The Scorpion’s Tale, 2021
3. Diablo Mesa, 2022
4. Dead Mountain, 2023

Gideon Crew Books in Publication Order

with Lincoln Child

Gideon Crew is a brilliant scientist, master thief, intrepid adventurer, and a prodigy. Witnessing his father’s (a world-class mathematician) wrongful accusation and subsequent death at a young age shapes Crew’s life and career. He becomes involved in high-stakes missions, solving complex puzzles and eliminating sinister plots.

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

Wyman Ford Books in Publication Order

Ford is a former CIA agent turned private investigator and freelance operative for the U.S. government working on cases that often involve scientific or paranormal elements.

solo series

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

Standalone Novels in Order of Publication

• Jennie, 1994
• Mount Dragon, 1996 (with Lincoln Child)
• Riptide, 1998 (with Lincoln Child)
• Thunderhead, 1999 (features an early Nora Kelly) (with Lincoln Child)
• The Ice Limit, 2000 (with Lincoln Child)
• The Codex, 2003
• Fourteen Days, 2024 (with others)
• Extinction, 2024

Novellas, and Short Stories in Order of Publication

with Lincoln Child

• Gaslighted: Slappy the Ventriloquist Dummy vs. Aloysius Pendergast, 2014 (with Lincoln Child and R. L. Stine)
• Gone Fishing, 2017 (A short story in the Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night series – features Vincent D’Agosta)

Short Story Collections and Anthologies in Order of Publication

• Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, 2006 (edited by James Patterson)
• Gone Fishing and Other Stories, 2012
• FaceOff, 2014

Non-Fiction Books in Publication Order

• 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 (with Steve Moore, John Douglas Marshall, Mark Olshaker)
• The Lost City of the Monkey God, 2017
• The Lost Tomb, And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder, 2023

Douglas Preston Biography – About the Author

Douglas Preston was born as Douglas Jerome Preston in 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He grew up as a rebellious child in Wellesley, a boring suburb in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Later, he attended and graduated from  Cambridge School of Weston in Weston, Massachusetts, and Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Between 1978 and 1985 Douglas Preston worked at the American Museum of Natural History, which is the place where he first started writing. He worked there as a writer, editor, and manager of publications.

In 1985 he wrote his first book, Dinosaurs In the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History, which is a non-fiction story about the popular New York museum and its history, describing the museum’s early explorers and expeditions.

An interesting side note, the editor of Douglas Preston’s first book was none other than Lincoln Child, the very same author who would become Douglas Preston’s longtime writing partner. This book was the main inspiration behind the idea of creating the FBI Special Agent Pendergast book series.

After leaving the museum, in 1986 Preston moved to Mexico where he began his full-time writing career. The author’s most popular work to date is the FBI Agent Pendergast novel series, which he wrote in collaboration with Lincoln Child.

In addition to the FBI Special Agent Pendergast series, Douglas Preston has worked on several other books with Lincoln Child, including the Gideon Crew series, Beyond the Ice Limit, and several standalone novels.

Of course, he also wrote solo novels. Among the first Douglas Preston’s books, Jennie, was a book about an adopted chimpanzee. The next solo book he wrote was The Codex, an adventure novel involving hunting for treasures. While this book is standalone, it does introduce us to two characters, Tom Broadbent and Sally Colorado, who would feature in the author’s Wyman Ford series’s first novel,  Tyrannosaur Canyon.

While living in Italy for a while, he was interested in the Monster of Florence, a serial killer who was never found. His research in the case resulted in him being arrested and interviewing the police in relation to the killing. Douglas Preston describes the whole story in his nonfiction book The Monster of Florence, which was published in 2008. The book was so popular that it not only received several awards in the US and Europe but it is also developed into a movie by 20th Century Fox, featuring George Clooney playing Douglas Preston.

While he has written several solo novels (mostly part of the Wyman Ford series), there are also a good number of non-fiction Douglas Prestonn’s books, many of them centered around the history of the American Southwest.

In 2010, Douglas Preston took part in the first USO tour along with authors like James Rollins, David Morrell, Steve Berry, and Andy Harp. The group visited two medical centers where they gave away their books. Next, they went to Iraq and Kuwait, visiting the combat zones.

In 2011, author Douglas Preston got the degree of Doctor of Letters from Pomona College.

In 2015 Douglas Preston took part in an expedition where he and the team members would become sick with an incurable tropical disease called mucocutaneous leishmaniasis. On the upside, the team discovered an ancient city in a yet unexplored valley in the Mosquitia mountains of Eastern Honduras. The expedition would be chronicled in the author’s solo non-fiction work, The Lost City of the Monkey God, which was eventually published in 2017. The expedition was sponsored, among others, by National Geographic, and was led by Steve Elkins, a well-known cinematographer, and explorer.

Currently, the author Douglas Preston is on the Board of Governors of the Authors Guild and is also a member of the Long Rider’s Guild, as well as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Some of Douglas Preston’s ancestors are Emily Dickinson, sexologist Robert Latou Dickinson, and the infamous murderer and opium addict Amasa Greenough.

Douglas Preston Books Overview

Wyman Ford Series Overview

A stunning archaeological thriller from Douglas Preston, the New York Times bestselling co-author of Brimstone and Relic. A moon rock missing for thirty years…Five buckets of blood-soaked sand found in a New Mexico canyon…A scientist with ambition enough to kill…A monk who will redeem the world…A dark agency with a deadly mission…The greatest scientific discovery of all time…

What fire bolt from the galactic dark shattered the Earth eons ago, and now hides in that remote cleft in the southwest U.S. known as Tyrannosaur Canyon?

The world’s biggest supercollider, locked in an Arizona mountain, was built to reveal the secrets of the very moment of creation: the Big Bang itself.

The Torus is the most expensive machine ever created by humankind, run by the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It is the brainchild of Nobel Laureate William North Hazelius. Will the Torus divulge the mysteries of the creation of the universe? Or will it, as some predict, suck the earth into a mini black hole? Or is the Torus a Satanic attempt, as a powerful televangelist decries, to challenge God Almighty on the very throne of Heaven?

Twelve scientists under the leadership of Hazelius are sent to the remote mountain to turn it on, and what they discover must be hidden from the world at all costs. Wyman Ford, ex-monk and CIA operative, is tapped to wrest their secret, a secret that will either destroy the world…or save it. The countdown begins…

Wyman Ford is tapped for a secret expedition to Cambodia… to locate the source of strangely beautiful gemstones that do not appear to be of this world.

A brilliant meteor lights up the Maine coast… and two young women borrow a boat and set out for a distant island to find the impact crater.

A scientist at the National Propulsion Facility discovers an inexplicable source of gamma rays in the outer Solar System. He is found decapitated, the data missing.

High resolution NASA images reveal an unnatural feature hidden in the depths of a crater on Mars… and it appears to have been activated.

Sixty hours and counting.

NASA is building a probe to be splashed down in the Kraken Mare, the largest sea on Saturn’s great moon, Titan. It is one of the most promising habitats for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, but the surface is unpredictable and dangerous, requiring the probe to contain artificial intelligence software. To this end, Melissa Shepherd, a brilliant programmer, has developed “Dorothy,” a powerful, self-modifying AI whose true potential is both revolutionary and terrifying. When miscalculations lead to a catastrophe during testing, Dorothy flees into the Internet.

Former CIA agent Wyman Ford is tapped to help Melissa Shepherd track down the rogue AI. As Ford and Shepherd search for Dorothy, they realize that her horrific experiences in the wasteland of the Internet have changed her in ways they can barely imagine. And they’re not the only ones looking for the wayward software: the AI is also being pursued by a pair of Wall Street traders, who want to capture her code and turn her into a high-speed trading bot.

Traumatized, angry, and relentlessly hunted, Dorothy has an extraordinary revelation—and devises a plan. As the pursuit of Dorothy converges on a deserted house on the coast of Northern California, Ford must face the ultimate question: is rescuing Dorothy the right thing? Is the AI bent on saving the world… or on wiping out the cancer that is humankind?

Standalone Novels Overview

Douglas Preston’s Jennie, based on the real story of the chimpanzee who inspired Curious George, is the celebrated novel that was made into the award-winning Disney television film The Jennie Project . Translated into many languages, Jennie became a worldwide bestselling sensation.

On a research trip to West Africa, Dr. Hugo Archibald of the Boston Museum of Natural History encounters an orphaned baby chimpanzee. Archibald decides to bring the ape, whom he names Jennie, back to Boston and raise her alongside his own two young children as a kind of scientific experiment.

Jennie captures the hearts of everyone she encounters. She believes herself to be a human being. She does almost everything a human child can, from riding a tricycle to fighting over the television with her siblings to communicating in American Sign Language.

Told from shifting points of view of those closest to Jennie, this heartwarming and bittersweet novel forces us to take a closer look at the species that shares 98 percent of our DNA and ask ourselves the What does it really mean to be human?

“Greetings from the dead,” declares Maxwell Broadbent on the videotape he left behind after his mysterious disappearance. A notorious treasure hunter and tomb robber, Broadbent accumulated over a half a billion dollars’ worth of priceless art, gems, and artifacts before vanishing—along with his entire collection—from his mansion in New Mexico.

At first, robbery is suspected, but the truth proves far stranger: As a final challenge to his three sons, Broadbent has buried himself and his treasure somewhere in the world, hidden away like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. If the sons wish to claim their fabulous inheritance, they must find their father’s carefully concealed tomb.

The race is on, but the three brothers are not the only ones competing for the treasure. This secret is so astounding it cannot be kept quiet for long. With half a billion dollars at stake, as well as an ancient Mayan codex that may hold a cure for cancer and other deadly diseases, others soon join the hunt—and some of them will stop at nothing to claim the grave goods.

Erebus Resort, occupying a magnificent, hundred-thousand–acre valley deep in the Colorado Rockies, offers guests the experience of viewing woolly mammoths, Irish Elk, and giant ground sloths in their native habitat, brought back from extinction through the magic of genetic manipulation. When a billionaire’s son and his new wife are kidnapped and murdered in the Erebus back country by what is assumed to be a gang of eco-terrorists, Colorado Bureau of Investigation Agent Frances Cash partners with county sheriff James Colcord to track down the perpetrators. As killings mount and the valley is evacuated, Cash and Colcord must confront an ancient, intelligent, and malevolent presence at Erebus, bent not on resurrection but on extinction.