In 1964, the young Douglas Preston buried a tin time capsule in a field with his best friend. Decades later, in a moment of nostalgic curiosity, Preston set out to unearth the box of buried treasure, but the remembered childhood landscape of its location was too altered to find it again. Later, Preston looked up the friend only to discover that the man had died years earlier, bludgeoned to death for unclear reasons in the boarding house where he lived. Preferring to remember his friend as the quiet, shy boy he had known, Preston made the conscious choice to step away, never finding out the exact circumstances of his friend’s murder.
That tension of the knowable and the unknowable permeates the bestselling novelist’s new collection of essays, The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder, all of which concern that which lies buried. Written over a span of decades for publications such as The New Yorker and Smithsonian Magazine, these essays tackle shadowy things that resist being brought to light in archaeology, in anthropology and in ourselves. Preston, who co-authors the popular Pendergast series with Lincoln Child, presents mysteries—a lost tomb in Egypt, a series of grisly murders in the Italian countryside, an elaborately booby-trapped pit rumored to contain treasure—in which the secrets seem to multiply as increasing efforts are made to expose them. He has compiled a book that haunts.
It is human nature to become preoccupied with revealing that which has been concealed. Indeed, Preston’s essays are peppered with journalists, archaeologists, detectives and ordinary people who become so consumed with the desire to expose truth that it crowds out friends, family and the regular stuff of daily life. These figures endure ridicule and persecution, yet they cheerfully surrender their entire lives to the chase. It is hard work to convince yourself that you would make a different choice, so skillfully sketched is the lure of the unknown in Preston’s collection of essays. From the safe distance of the pages of The Lost Tomb, we are allowed a delicious taste of what it is to be consumed with the desire to know, even when all evidence points to the fact that, maybe, we are better off leaving a mystery alone.
