Cities of Gold—A Journey Across the American Southwest

In 1989, Douglas Preston and a friend, Walter Nelson, set out on horseback across one thousand miles of Arizona and New Mexico, retracing the Spanish explorer Coronado’s search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold.

They rode cross country, not following modern roads or trails, sleeping 'in the saddle' and enduring some of the harshest deserts and roughest mountain terrain in the United States. Forced to battle extremes of heat and cold, impenetrable mesquite thickets, bad water, rattlesnakes, flash floods and paralyzing drought, they nonetheless found the country awesome in its scale and beauty, with much of it so untouched that it was still recognizable from descriptions in Coronado's reports.

At the heart of the book is Preston's search for a new understanding of that moment when Europeans first fought Indians in the borders of what would become America—and the fatal consequences that resulted. For what Preston finds when he rediscovers the actual ruins of the Seven Cities of Gold—the mud pueblos of the Zuni Indians—is not a tale of the winning of the West, but a frightening story of loss.

Cities of Gold includes unforgettable portraits of such Indian leaders as Geronimo, Cochise, and the Zuni leader Palowahtiwa, along with stories of gun battles and feuds, and old memories of cattle drives, dust, and the open range.

In the end, Cities of Gold leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of the Southwest—as it was when Europeans first saw it and as it is today. Since the book's publication fifteen years ago, it has become a classic. (book description)

Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe were the perfect couple: young, attractive, and ideally matched. But the veil of perfection can mask many blemishes. When the Thorpes are found dead in their tasteful Flagstaff living room (having committed double suicide), alarms go off in the towering Manhattan offices of Eden Incorporated, the high-tech matchmaking company whose spectacular success, and legendary secrecy, has inspired awe around the world. The Thorpes, few people knew, were more than the quintessential happy couple—they were Eden’s first perfect match.

A short time later, Christopher Lash, a gifted former FBI forensic psychologist, receives an urgent plea from Eden to perform a quick—and quiet—investigation into the deaths.

Lash´s psychological autopsy reveals nothing suspicious, but inadvertently dredges up the memories of a searing personal tragedy he has kept at bay for years.

The situation changes suddenly when a second Eden couple is found dead—by all appearances, another double suicide. Now Eden—particularly Richard Silver, the company´s brilliant and reclusive founder—has no choice but to grant Lash unprecedented access to its most guarded secrets if he is to have any chance of determining what is going wrong. The hidden world he discovers is a stunning labyrinth of artificial intelligence, creative genius, and a melding of technology that does indeed, to Lash´s surprise, deliver on Eden´s promise to its clients: the guarantee of a perfect, lifelong mate. But Lash´s involvement in the investigation becomes more personal and dangerous than he could have imagined, nearly as soon as it begins. (book description)

TWELVE THOUSAND FEET BENEATH THE ATLANTIC OCEAN . . . SCIENTISTS ARE EXCAVATING THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY UNDERSEA DISCOVERY EVER MADE. BUT IS IT THE GREATEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND IN HISTORY—OR THE MOST TERRIFYING?

"Few writers do it better than Child"
—BOOKLIST

Former naval doctor Peter Crane is urgently summoned to a remote oil platform in the North Atlantic to help diagnose a bizarre medical condition spreading through the rig. But when he arrives, Crane learns that the real trouble lies far below—on "Deep Storm," a stunningly advanced science research facility built two miles beneath the ocean floor. The top-secret structure has been designed for one uprpose: to excavate a recently discovered undersea site that may hold the answers to a mystery steeped in centuries of myth and speculation.

Sworn to secrecy, Dr. Crane descends to Deep Storm. A year earlier, he is told, routine drilling uncovered the remains of mankind’s most sophisticated ancient civilization: the legendary Atlantis. But now that the site is being excavated, a series of disturbing illnesses has begun to affect the operation. Scientists and technicians are experiencing a bizarre array of symptoms—from simple fatigue to violent psychotic episodes. As Crane is indoctrinated into the strange world of Deep Storm and commences his investigation, he begins to suspect that the covert facility conceals something more complicated than a medical mystery. The discovery of Atlantis might, in fact be a cover for something afr more sinister . . . and deadly.

Like Lincoln Child's spectacular bestsellers coauthored with Douglas Preston (The Book of the Dead, Relic), Deep Storm melds scientific detail and gripping adventure in a superbly imagined, chillingly real journey into unknown territory. Child is a master of suspense, and Deep Storm is his most ambitious novel to date. (book description)

Personal note:This book was hard to put down. While I didn't like every twist and turn the plot took, my biggest disappointment was that it wasn't longer and more in-depth, both the plot in general, and the development of relationships between certain characters. I also found Crane to be a little bit too slow in following orders early on, considering his military background. But overall, I highly recommend this book.

Dinosaurs in the Attic—An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History

Dinosaurs in the Attic is the book that brought Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston together. Preston had been writing a column for Natural History magazine when Child, then a rising young editor at St. Martin’s Press, called him up and asked him to write a book about the museum. Dinosaurs in the Attic was the result, written by Douglas Preston and edited by Lincoln Child.

Later Child suggested they write a thriller set in the Museum, and Relic was the result. Chapters in Dinosaurs in the Attic also inspired other novels, including The Ice Limit and Preston’s solo novel, Jennie.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York is one of the best-loved museums in the United States. Some four million people come through its doors every year. They marvel at the dinosaur skeletons, the meteorites, the elephants and the gems. And yet less than five percent of the Museum’s collections are on display.

Beyond the exhibition halls, along seemingly endless corridors, basement rooms, attic vaults and locked cabinets, the Museum houses a veritable stockpile of world records: the biggest elephant tusks, the finest uncut emerald, the world’s smallest beetle, millions of spiders, butterflies, dinosaur bones, whales, diamonds, gold masks, gigantic rubies, thousands of mummies, shrunken heads, and much more.

How was all this started? Who amassed these fabulous collections, and how? Here you will read the true story of the discovery and transportation of the world’s largest meteorite; the discovery of the first T. Rex; the incredible theft of the Star of India in the biggest jewel heist in history; the bizarre story of the Copper Man; the failed search for the "Arctic Atlantis," and much more. You will read stories of expeditions to the ends of the earth, true tales of heroism, defeat, discovery, death, madness, and even murder—all in the pursuit of science.

Dinosaurs in the Attic takes the reader into the deepest sub-basements of the Museum and uncovers hidden treasures never seen by the public. It sheds new light on familiar exhibits and halls, talking to the scientists and curators who created them. (book description)

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, which he named Jennie, back to Boston and raise her alongside his own two young children.

Jennie captures the hearts of everyone she encounters. She believes herself to be a human being, and she does almost everything a human child can, from riding a tricycle to fighting with her siblings over television. She soon attracts the attention of a famous primatologist, who decides to include her in an experiment to teach chimpanzees to communicate using American Sign Language. Everything goes well; but what happens when the experiment is over?

Told from shifting points of view of those closest to Jennie, this bittersweet novel forces us to take a closer look at the species that shares 98 percent of our DNA. The novel confronts the question: what does it really mean to be human?

Jennie is partly based on the real story of the chimpanzee who inspired Curious George, a chimp who was raised at the American Museum of Natural History in the 1930s. Jennie was made into the award-winning Disney television film, The Jennie Project. It was translated into many languages and became a worldwide best-seller. (book description)

Ribbons of Time—The Dalquest Research Site

Five years ago, the well-known Texas photographer Walter W. Nelson asked Douglas Preston to join him on an unusual adventure: to explore a virtually unknown canyon in the Big Bend of Texas and produce a book about it. Their exploration has resulted in Ribbons of Time, a magnificent volume of photographs by Nelson, with text by Preston, which will be published in a very small (but extremely high-quality) printing by Midwestern State University Press. This volume is a labor of love by Preston and Nelson and it won't be available in bookstores. Photo Eye Books in Santa Fe will be carrying the book for sale over the internet.

The Big Bend country of Texas remains one of the most extraordinary landscapes in America. The geology of the Big Bend has been called the most complex on earth, a land built and wrecked over 700 million years by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, lava flows, floods, faulting, uplifts and erosion. It contains every kind of mountain known to geology. The Big Bend is home to some of the richest flora and fauna in North America, thick with mountain lions, rare bighorn desert sheep, and more species of birds than any other piece of land its size in North America.

In 1996, Walter W. Dalquest and Rose Dalquest donated a remote and unknown canyon in the Big Bend, known as the Devil's Graveyard, to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, to be used for research into the natural sciences.

Ribbons of Time is a deep portrait, in photographs and text, of this extraordinary Texas canyon, a land truly lost in time. It is a forbidding and violent fissure in the earth, seventy miles from the nearest town, so rugged that much of it is barely penetrable even on foot, a landscape visited by probably fewer than a dozen white people over its entire existence. Here, avalanches are a common occurrence, flash floods tear through the washes hurling along eight foot boulders, and temperatures at the ground in summer can exceed 150 degrees. But it is also a place of breathtaking beauty, where springs drip from walls of maidenhair fern, where pools lie hidden at the base of lava cliffs, where mysterious rock formations challenge one’s sense of reality.

Famed Southwestern photographer Walter W. Nelson spent two years exploring this remarkable canyon. He built a trail down into it, packed in his supplies by muleback, and established several base camps.

Among the equipment he packed down on muleback was a huge 8 x 10 Deardorff view camera of the exact kind used by Ansel Adams. Nelson visited and lived in the canyon across four seasons, photographing its magnificent geological formations, springs, plants, animals, and big skies. He experienced the canyon’s extremes: awesome electrical storms, avalanches, flash floods, intense heat, ice storms, and downpours that turned the canyon’s cliffs into a breathtaking spectacle of ten thousand waterfalls. The magnificent and rare photography in this volume is the result of that two-year odyssey.

Douglas Preston's text recounts the sweeping history of the canyon, beginning with its birth in violence and fire some fifty million years ago. The story of the canyon is the history of trans-Pecos Texas in miniature: the canyon is flanked on the east by the Great Comanche War Trail and on the west by the Chihuahua Trail, and it thus lies squarely in the middle of Texas history. Here you will read about the Clovis mammoth hunters, early Spanish explorers, the Apache wars, Texas Rangers, pioneers, Eastern "starve-outs," ranchers, outlaws, cowboys, and railroad men—all of whom shaped this land with their blood, sweat, and tears.

The result is Ribbons of Time, a rare and elegant volume which combines photographic art, history, and science in a deep exploration of a unique and unknown Texas canyon. There are few undiscovered places left in America. This is one of them.

The publisher has created a special, signed, limited edition of Ribbons of Time, limited to 50 specially bound and slipcased volumes. Each copy is numbered, and personally signed by Douglas Preston and Walter Nelson. Three original, unbound photographic prints, signed by Nelson, come with each volume. The volumes are available for purchase from Photo Eye Books of Santa Fe, one of the leading photographic bookstores in the country, which also has an excellent website. book description)

The Royal Road—El Camino Real from Mexico City to Santa Fe

In 1598, the Spanish Conquistador Juan de Oñate led the first permanent European settlers into what would become the United States. Four hundred years later, Douglas Preston and his wife Christine retraced the two thousand mile road blazed by Oñate between Mexico City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Prestons journeyed by car, by horseback, and on foot, following the entire length of the trail. In one unforgettable experience, they crossed the dreaded Jornada del Muerto desert on horseback, becoming the first travelers in the 20th century to do so. The Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert was the most dangerous portion of the trail, where Oñate and his settlers nearly died of thirst.

Christine Preston’s photographs, made with a 4 x 5 view camera, show wild places that have hardly changed over the centuries as well as churches, ruins, villages, and modern cityscapes in Mexico and the United States. Douglas Preston’s text tells the story of one of the most ancient human trails in North America, which began twelve thousand years ago as a series of Indian footpaths following the migratory routes of mastondons. It became the most important prehistoric trade route in western North America, over which farming, corn, beans and pottery first came into the Southwest. He tells the story of Oñate and the later travelers on the trail, and chronicles his own exploration of the route. The book creates a fascinating and indelible portrait of New Mexico, the founding of Santa Fe, and the settlement of the Southwest.

The Royal Road won the 1999 Villagrá Award for outstanding publication of the year on New Mexico history. (book description)

UTOPIA—Where technology dazzles–and then turns deadly!

Rising out of the stony canyons of Nevada, Utopia is a world on the cutting edge of technology. A theme park attracting 65,000 visitors each day, its dazzling array of robots and futuristic holograms make it a worldwide sensation.

But ominous mishaps are beginning to disrupt the once flawless technology. A friendly robot goes haywire, causing panic, and a popular roller coaster malfunctions, nearly killing a teenaged rider. Dr. Andrew Warne, the brilliant computer engineer who designed much of the park’s robotics, is summoned from the East Coast to get things back on track.

On the day Warne arrives, however, Utopia is caught in the grip of something far more sinister. A group of ruthless criminals has infiltrated the park's computerized infrastructure, giving them complete access to all of Utopia's attractions and systems. Their communication begins with a simple and dire warning: If their demands are met, none of the 65,000 people in the park that day will ever know they were there; if not, chaos will descend, and every man, woman, and child will become a target. As one of the brains behind Utopia, Warne finds himself thrust into a role he never imagined—trying to save the lives of thousands of innocent people. And as the minutes tick away, Warne’s struggle to outsmart his opponents grows ever more urgent, for his only daughter is among the unsuspecting crowds in the park. (book description)

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