Perhaps the biggest mystery of P&C’s career is why Hollywood hasn’t made all of their novels into movies, and “Still Life with Crows” in particular reads like a great horror film. He’s wrong, and we know it, but “Still Life” has such a bizarre answer for the murderer’s identity that we forgive Hazen for going down the wrong path. Hazen makes a logical leap pointing to a businessman in nearby Deeper as the culprit behind the string of murders with a seemingly ritualistic touch. It might’ve been tempting for P&C to make Medicine Creek’s Sheriff Hazen into a dolt and play his investigation as a joke, but he’s actually competent, and his annoyance with Pendergast butting into his territory is understandable. “Still Life” makes a compelling case that sometimes that’s all a troubled teen needs to get on a good path. Pendergast is weird – wearing all black in the cruel August heat and being particular about the preparation of his beef and tea - but he’s the first adult who has treated Corrie with respect. Pendergast does odd and amazing things here – notably dream-walking into the past to learn the details of a battle between Indians and white settlers – and I buy it because of the perspective of the cynical Corrie, who is increasingly won over. The vacationing agent (yes, he pursues a case in a remote corner of the USA on his “vacation”) makes teenage Goth girl Corrie a better person simply by trusting her as his assistant, and they both become more entertaining characters by playing off each other. In their eighth novel (and fourth starring the FBI agent), the masters click on all cylinders like Pendergast’s Rolls-Royce. It became my favorite Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child novel on my first read, and it still holds that status. “Still Life with Crows” (2003) is “merely” a standalone Agent Pendergast novel, but it features the introduction of Corrie Swanson, the evocative cornfields and caves (!) of western Kansas, a looming storm and a monster even creepier than the “Relic” beast.

Still life with crows