Douglas Preston’s solo work

I have previously posted about the writing team of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. They have the long-running Pendergast series which I’ve reviewed, the more recent Gideon Cross series, plus a small number of stand-alone novels that actually tie into both of these series.

But both of them also write their own solo novels. While I have not read Child’s solo works, I have read Preston’s and enjoyed them. Most star his character Wyman Ford.

So far, he has put out:

• “The Codex” (2004)
• “Tyrannosaur Canyon” (2005)
• “Blasphemy” (2008)
• “Impact” (2010)
• “The Kraken Project” (2014)

The first novel, “The Codex” is a pretty good adventure/treasure hunt set in Central America. The main characters are Tom Broadbent and Sally Colorado. During the adventure, Tom meets his half-brother, and at the end of the novel, they all return to the American Southwest.

The next novel, “Tyrannosaur Canyon,” brings back Tom and Sally, but also serves to introduce us to Wyman Ford. An ex-CIA agent, he is now a monk-in-training at a monastery near to Tom’s ranch in the Southwest, where a tyrannosaur skeleton is found. But there is a very dangerous secret about that skeleton that some are willing to kill for, and Tom, Sally, and Wyman Ford are all in danger. This also moves this book into the techno-thriller genre.

Wyman returns in the next novel, this time no longer a monk-in-training, but now running his own consulting company. In “Blasphemy,” we get a team of scientists working on a particle accelerator who have seemingly found a way to communicate with God! But this draws the ire of a group of fundamentalists who attack the scientists. Wyman is caught in the middle trying to figure out what is really going on. Have they really found a way to communicate with God, or is there more going on here?

In “Impact,” Wyman is put on the the mission to find the source of a deadly set of gemstones. This leads to the discovery that we seem to be the target of gamma rays coming from Mars! Are we being attacked by aliens? About half the novel focuses on another character who doesn’t meet up with Wyman until close to the end, and actually comes up with a clever solution to what is going on. I thought she might return in the next novel, but she doesn’t.

The most recent novel, “The Kraken Project,” has Wyman in another techno-thriller adventure. This time the matter is AIs — Artificial Intelligences. One has been created to be the “pilot” of an unmanned probe to a moon of Saturn, but has somehow “escaped” onto the Internet, and Wyman must track it down. Can he do it? Or is it really a danger that must be found and destroyed? A slightly different take on this theme.

Overall, this has been an interesting series. I find Wyman Ford a different sort of techno-thriller hero. While he has the skills, he is not the violent sort, more working out a solution to the problem, or working with others to do so, instead of rushing in a shooting people. It will be interesting to see what we might see next with this character, though it may be a while, considering the gaps in the series.