Bloodless / Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER: Agent Pendergast faces his most unexpected challenge yet when bloodless bodies begin to appear in Savannah, GA.



A fabulous heist:

On the evening of November 24, 1971, D. B. Cooper hijacked Flight 305--Portland to Seattle--with a fake bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000, and then parachuted from the rear of the plane, disappearing into the night...and into history.



A brutal crime steeped in legend and malevolence:

Fifty years later, Agent Pendergast takes on a bizarre and gruesome case: in the ghost-haunted city of Savannah, Georgia, bodies are found with no blood left in their veins--sowing panic and reviving whispered tales of the infamous Savannah Vampire.



A case like no other:

As the mystery rises along with the body count, Pendergast and his partner, Agent Coldmoon, race to understand how--or if--these murders are connected to the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. Together, they uncover not just the answer...but an unearthly evil beyond all imagining.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In November 1971, D.B. Cooper hijacked a Portland-to-Seattle flight, collected a $200,000 ransom, and parachuted into oblivion. Fifty years later, bodies drained of blood are beginning to stack up in the streets of Savanah, GA, raising fears that the city's legendary vampire is real. Agent Pendergast is about to discover the link between these stories. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

Publishers Weekly Review

A prologue to Preston and Child's disappointing 20th thriller featuring FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast (after 2020's Crooked River) depicts the notorious unsolved 1971 plane hijacking by D.B. Cooper in the Pacific Northwest. In the present, Pendergast and his partner, Armstrong Coldmoon, have been dispatched to Georgia to investigate several baffling murders. As the victims were drained of blood through one of their multiple stab wounds, the killer is dubbed the Savannah Vampire. Pressure to close the case quickly comes from a boorish U.S. senator, who fears bad press about the crimes will imperil his reelection bid. Pendergast's ward, Constance Greene, assists by befriending a reclusive hotel owner rumored to have prolonged her life by drinking human blood. How the plane hijacking ties in with the current action will surprise readers, but the lack of real scares, an outlandish solution to the central mystery, and a lead who's more action hero than Sherlockian sleuth render this a lesser series entry. X-Files fans will best appreciate this one. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

Following pretty much immediately after the conclusion of Crooked River (2020), the new Pendergast novel finds the FBI Special Agent winging his way to Georgia, where human bodies have been found drained of their blood. A local legend concerning a vampire has got some people spooked, but Pendergast, always the pragmatist, believes there is a less supernatural explanation. But what's really got him intrigued is the apparent connection between these modern-day murders and the 1971 airplane hijacking famously perpetrated by a man known only as D. B. Cooper. It will come as no surprise to fans of the long-running Pendergast series (Relic, the first novel in which he appeared, was published in 1995) that this novel is exquisitely written and beautifully plotted, and that Pendergast continues to be one of the most interesting characters in the thriller genre. Preston and Child each have thriving solo writing careers, but when they team up, great things happen.

Kirkus Book Review

FBI Special Agent Pendergast and his cohorts face great peril as they try to find out what's bleeding a Georgia city dry. In 1971, the mysterious hijacker D.B. Cooper parachutes from a commercial airliner with a bundle of cash in the remote northwest and is never heard from again. A half-century later, Aloysius X.L. Pendergast and colleague Armstrong Coldmoon are sent to Savannah, Georgia, to investigate a "most peculiar incident": a body has washed ashore with nary a drop of blood left in the corpse. A reader's first thought might be What's that got to do with an old hijacking? Leave it to the imaginations of Preston and Child to eventually make the delightfully strange connection. Pendergast looks every bit the stereotypical undertaker, not at all fitting the FBI mold. He brings along his adult "ward," Constance Greene, who brings her stiletto everywhere she goes. Meanwhile, bloodless bodies accumulate. Who could possibly be committing these frightful atrocities? And why only in Savannah? That one's easy: because it's a spooky old city "with its gnarled trees and crooked houses," and everything about the plot is spooky and surreal. A film crew prepares to create a phony documentary in a graveyard using smoke machines and showing callous disregard for the dead. A scheming U.S. senator frets that the rapid escalation in ghastly violence will hurt his reelection prospects, and he pressures the FBI for a rapid solution. Unfortunately, the killer makes an unholy mess of the city, sucking out its Southern charm along with plenty of blood. He--she--let's settle on it--turns the tale into one of more horror than crime. Without Pendergast's perspicacity, Coldmoon's competence, and Constance's cojones (figuratively, of course), that old city of mint juleps would be a smoking hole in the ground. And readers wouldn't learn about D.B. Cooper's fate. The authors' imaginations run unfettered as they travel to unearthly locales, but in the end it comes down to beleaguered Savannah. All of Pendergast's adventures are weird and wonderful fun, and this is no exception. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.