Two Graves

This new Preston and Child collaboration brings their Helen Trilogy to a slam-bang, breathless close, with their astonishingly resourceful hero, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, single-handedly storming a Nazi stronghold in a South American jungle in his search for his wife's murderer. It's the culmination of a panoply of wildly improbable events. But that's what readers of the series have come to cherish, along with noble heroes and despicable, seemingly unstoppable villains—e.g. sociopaths, science-bred to Aryan perfection. Rene Auberjonois has narrated enough of these thrillers to have developed not just the perfect vocal match for the erudite, stern-willed Pendergast, but the ability to capture the books' mysterious, gothic, almost phantasmagoric moods. Even better, his long career as a stage and screen performer has provided him with the talent and experience to understand that, sometimes, when action and emotions are pushed to extremes, it's wiser to underplay the scene. A Grand Central hardcover. (Dec.)