The Cabinet of Curiosities

The Cabinet of Curiosities is a thriller novel by American writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, released on June 3, 2002 by Grand Central Publishing. This is the third installment in the Special Agent Pendergast series. Workers at a construction site in Manhattan discover a long-buried tunnel containing the bodies of 36 young people from over a century ago, each with part of their spines removed. Secretive Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast takes an interest in the case and recruits Dr. Nora Kelly, an archaeologist at New York City's American Museum of Natural History, to quickly investigate the crime scene and collect evidence prior to the intervention of Anthony Fairhaven, the wealthy real estate developer who is directing the construction of a new apartment tower on the property. Fairhaven has the bodies quickly removed and the discovery hushed up, but Dr. Kelly is able to recover a note with the name and address of one of the victims, a poor young girl named Mary Greene. Afraid of losing her job, Dr. Kelly is reluctant to continue the investigation, but Agent Pendergast convinces her to continue in pursuit of what he believes to be the case of a century-old string of brutal murders. The two soon discover that the tunnel was located underneath a former cabinet of curiosities owned by a man named Shottum, which burned down a century previously. Despite the efforts of Roger C. Brisbane III, a Museum bureaucrat and Dr. Kelly's boss, to curtail their efforts in fear of threatening Fairhaven's contributions to the museum, they are able to locate letters by Shottum in the museum archives detailing Shottum's discovery of the murderous scientific experiments that his renter, Dr. Enoch Leng, was conducting in pursuit of extending the human lifespan. They suspect that Leng abducted his victims from the cabinet of curiosities, and that he murdered Shottum and burned down the building when he was discovered.