Verses for the Dead: A Pendergast Novel

The crimes under investigation in Preston and Child’s underwhelming 18th thriller featuring FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast (after 2018’s City of Endless Night) are tame by the bestselling authors’ usual standard. Walter Pickett, an FBI assistant director recently assigned to the New York City field office, is determined to keep maverick Pendergast under his control, unlike his predecessors, and assigns him a partner, Special Agent Coldmoon . Coldmoon is to keep a close eye on him as the two investigators head to Miami Beach, where a human heart has been left on the grave of Elise Baxter, who strangled herself with a bedsheet in Maine 11 years earlier. A note signed Mister Brokenhearts and quoting T.S. Eliot was left along with the freshly harvested organ. Pendergast insists that the choice of grave was an intentional one, and that circumstances of the old suicide be reexamined, even as Mister Brokenhearts strikes again. The X-Files pilot–like plot of a younger agent assigned to spy on a brilliant but eccentric colleague is old hat, and Pendergast himself doesn’t appear to best advantage in an outing that shows the series’ age. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Dec.)