Diablo Mesa by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Diablo Mesa
by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Hardcover, 400 pages
Published: February 15th, 2022
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Preston & Child’s latest adventure for feisty archeologist Nora Kelly and the rookie FBI Agent Corrie Swanson has them finding trouble again. This time, Nora calls Corrie when she uncovers a pair of bodies buried at the site of the 1947 Roswell incident (which she’s been talked into treating as a legitimate archeological dig).

Wait. Maybe I should have led with that.

When space-tech billionaire Lucas Tappan shows up at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute to offer a healthy sum for someone to do a serious archeological study of the Roswell site there’s only one catch; Nora Kelly has to lead the effort. Nora is already put out by getting passed over by a male counterpart for a promotion, and the idea of linking her name to anything involving UFOs is more than she can stand, knowing that it would be a career killer.

Well, getting fired doesn’t look that good either, so when Lucas corners her in the parking lot (as she is clearing out her office), he makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Well, not for long anyway.  Soon, Nora, her brother Skip, and their dog Matty are whisked away to the supposed UFO crash site, where Lucas has already assembled a small village of Airstreams and RVs. But before they can start looking for buried UFO traces, Nora insisted they check out what looks like deep-scanning radar imagines of a pair of bodies near the site. Nora expects it to be a Native American burial site, which she can identify, report, recover, and get on with the job, but it turns out that they’re a man and a woman who appear to have been tortured, burned with acid to make them hard to identify, and then buried…at just about the time the Roswell Incident took place.

Fortunately, Nora has her FBI friend Corrie on speed dial.

What follows, just at the cover copy promises, is a “Pandora’s box of espionage and violence, uncovering bloody traces of a powerful force that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets.” 

Readers of previous books will be happy to find out that Corrine’s slow-cooking love interest, Sheriff  Homer Watts, gets roped into the mystery as well. He’s still wearing his Resistol silver belly and his grandfather’s Colt Peacemakers, somehow managing to pull the whole thing off without a touch of irony. Spoiler alert…the hat’s gonna take a beating. Nora’s due for some romance too, if she can take a moment from digging up bones, treasure, and possible alien crashes, but we’ll leave that to the reader to find out.

As soon as I saw the Roswell tie-in I was hooked, no surprise to anyone who knows me, and there’s enough conspiracy theory and thoughtfully-constructed evidence in here to make this a valid science fiction crossover while holding its own as a mystery/thriller. I especially appreciated the author’s familiarity with the three generations of government claims about what really happened at Roswell, weather balloon, nuclear monitoring device, and Russian alien spoof respectively, and the technology used to dig into the UFO portion of the mystery is very credibly handled.

Not that there actually are aliens on Diablo Mesa…but you’ll have to read the book to find out for sure.

Show From the publisher...
From the publisher: #1 New York Times bestselling authors Preston & Child continue with the wildly popular series featuring archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson.

Lucas Tappan, a wealthy and eccentric billionaire and founder of Icarus Space Systems, approaches the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute with an outlandish proposal—to finance a careful, scientific excavation of the Roswell Incident site, where a UFO is alleged to have crashed in 1947. A skeptical Nora Kelly, to her great annoyance, is tasked with the job.

Nora’s excavation immediately uncovers two murder victims buried at the site, faces and hands obliterated with acid to erase their identities. Special Agent Corrie Swanson is assigned to the case. As Nora’s excavation proceeds, uncovering things both bizarre and seemingly inexplicable, Corrie’s homicide investigation throws open a Pandora’s box of espionage and violence, uncovering bloody traces of a powerful force that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets—and that threatens to engulf them all in an unimaginable fate.