Diablo Mesa

Bestsellers Preston and Child go full X-Files in their excellent third thriller featuring archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI agent Corrie Swanson (after 2021’s The Scorpion’s Tail). When Nora’s boss at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute asks her to direct excavations at Roswell, N.Mex., the site of a supposed UFO crash in 1947, she quits, refusing to be part of a project that would make the institute a laughingstock and harm her career. The billionaire funding the project later persuades Nora to work for him directly, though she insists on first checking the accuracy of a recent aerial survey that detected evidence of human remains at the site. The subsequent discovery of two decades-old corpses, with bullet wounds in their skulls and burned-off features, involves Corrie, a skilled forensic anthropologist with a talent for facial reconstruction, and proves the precursor to more puzzles, including a baffling 1999 locked-room murder of a nuclear scientist and possible proof that what crashed at Roswell was not from Earth. The taut suspense and tight plotting that marked the authors’ earliest Pendergast novels are very much in evidence. Fans of kick-ass female leads will be delighted. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Feb.)