The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston (Nonfiction Article Collection, 2023).
Best-selling author Douglas Preston has made a career as both an investigative journalist (of real-life mysteries of both criminal and scientific natures) and as a novelist, both solo and as a collaborator with Lincoln Child. He has often used his nonfiction articles as inspiration for his thrilling fiction. But here he comes full-circle in a sense–going back and reprinting some of his most compelling nonfiction (each appended with updates from since the pieces appeared). Though these 13 factual accounts are, as he calls them, the “Origin Stories” behind his popular fictions.
The book is divided into 5 topical categories.
“Uncommon Murders” deals with 2 strange and dissimilar cases the author got himself personally involved in. First, “A Buried Treasure” is Preston’s account of how he and his childhood best friend decided to bury a sort of time capsule in the ground near where they lived. They lost touch with one another, as youngsters so often do. But his adult impulse to search for what they buried leads him to discover the unpleasant and violent, if unrelated fate that befell his former buddy.
The 2nd (and far more famous) case in that section of “The Monster of Florence”–a notorious and unsolved, years-long mass murder case that Preston investigated in Tuscany. With he and his wife living in Italy, they learned that one of a series of sex-murders occurred near their dwelling. Preston became obsessed with the frustrating case and teamed up with a dedicated local journalist in a frustrating and ultimately failed crusade to identify the killer, running afoul of the police in the process.
The 3 articles gathered under “Unexplained Deaths” are weird, indeed. In one, hundreds of human skeletons are found in and around an isolated lake high in the forbidding Himalayan Mountains. How did they get there, what killed them–and who were they? Modern genetic analysis of the remains only made things more mysterious, touching on matters of race, culture and religious fervor.
Next, the bizarre deaths of a group of skiers in the Ural Mountains in the 1950s proves a truly baffling and compelling case.
And “The Skeleton on the Riverbank” is all about the so-called Kennewick Man, a prehistoric person of unclear origins that was the subject of a famous legal tug of war between the government, scientists and the Native Americans who were tired of having their dead dug up for study. Like other pieces here, this one has important echoes in later articles.
“Unsolved Mysteries” features a trio science-related puzzles.
“The Mystery of Oak Island” is another matter focused on buried treasure–in this case supposed actual pirate gold on a tin y island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Somebody buried something there, way back when, and arranged the site with deadly booby traps that has claimed multiple lives over the centuries and bankrupted even more treasure hunters–but hey, it gave the History Channel one of its most popular docu-series.
Meanwhile, in the desert southwest, a legendary archaeologist claimed an Earth-shaking discovery in a cave. It could revolutionize our understanding of the earliest Americans. But what if it’s a fake?
And “The Mystery of Hell Creek” had a young paleontologist finding and seeking to authenticate evidence of the destruction raining from the skill via the dinosaur killing asteroid far from the site he discovered.
In “Curious Crimes,” we have an expert in the weapons of the Clovis mammoth hunters who duplicated these ancient people’s technology so well he almost got away with passing off his reproductions as the real thing and, back in Italy, “Trial by Fury” examines the case of wrongfully accused American girl convicted of murder by the same inept and vengeful legal official Preston ran afoul of in Tuscany. The long, twist-filled effort to clear Amanda Knox as also serves as a cautionary tale concerning how the Internet has unleashed hate and fanaticism in so many people, including those unconnected to the actual events.
Finally, “Old Bones” has a trio of articles. “Skeletons in the Closet” returns to the battle to return stolen skeletons and disinterred burial objects to Native Americans. “Cannibals of the Canyon” is about a controversial archaeologist out to prove that the collapse of one of the American Southwest’s great prehistoric civilizations was triggered by dark and gruesome acts.
Finally, we head to Egypt and the fabled Valley of the Kings for “The Lost Tomb.” Here, an immense and long-lost structure hides the apparent of burial site of Ramesses the Great’s legion of sons.
This is an exceptional book–compelling, thrilling and detailed, not to mention personal. The author cares about the things he writes about and manages to be passionate without losing objectivity or sounding self-righteous. It’s another fine and worthy effort from the man who gave us The Lost City of the Monkey God, among others
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