Review: It all started with the pasta
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 16, 2012
I've been a big fan of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child since Relic, their first book in the Aloysius Pendergast series. Together and individually, the two authors have written some of the most suspenseful stories of the past two decades. In the short story "Extraction," they turned back the clock to an earlier time when Aloysius and his younger brother Diogenes were kids growing up in New Orleans (the story takes place before the traumatic event that resulted in Diogenes' brain damage).The story begins in modern times, where Aloysius, his ward Constance, and Monsieur Bertin, one of Aloysius's childhood tutors, are having dinner in Pendergast's Riverside Drive mansion. A disagreement over the proper way to cook pasta led to a flashback story that took place in New Orleans when Aloysius was nine years old, and his brother Diogenes was six. With their mother in the hospital and their father away on business, their Uncle Everett was staying with them. Diogenes has just lost a baby tooth. Most kids did the tooth-under-the-pillow thing and hoped the Tooth Fairy would be generous, but in the French Quarter of New Orleans, an old tradition overrode the Tooth Fairy. Legend said that if you didn't bring your tooth to a mysterious old recluse named Maurus Dufour on the next full moon, he would come and get you.When Diogenes seemed determined to bundle his tooth off to Dufour, Aloysius attempted to intervene to disprove the legend. And that's where things began to go awry. As with most Pendergast stories, creepiness and mayhem ensued, and you just knew that the story wasn't going to have a happy ending for all."Extraction" was an engaging, suspenseful short story (about 300 Kindle locations). I think Preston and Child fans will enjoy the story, which serves to fill in another gap about Aloysius's and Diogenes' early relationship.