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May 21, 2015writermike rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Lincoln Child, who is co-author with Douglas Preston of the best-selling Agent Pendergast mysteries, has, like Preston, a successful solo career as a writer of thrillers. The Forgotten Room is the third of Child’s stand-alones, after The Third Gate and Deep Storm, to feature protagonist Jeremy Logan, an “enigmalogist” who’s called on to solve mysteries that appear to have a supernatural element. In this one, Logan is asked to investigate the strange death of an otherwise perfectly sane senior research fellow at an exclusive think-tank in Newport, Rhode Island, who appears to have been driven to suicide by unbearable voices and visions. Set in a gloomy gilded-age mansion, Child pulls out all the neo-gothic stops here as Jeremy Logan contends with mysterious hidden rooms, dripping cellars and subterranean passageways, crackling lightning and rolling thunder, a hurricane, infernal machines, and, of course sinister villains hell-bent on world domination. It’s all wonderfully redolent of the overwrought gothic pulp thrillers of the 1930s, and purposefully so. It’s the Hardy Boys for grown-ups, with thrills and chills aplenty, right down to the short cliff-hanger chapters. Nobody does it better than Child. Highly recommended as a summer beach read.