Lincoln Child

Lincoln Child is an American author best known as one half of the writing duo Preston & Child, alongside Douglas Preston, with whom he co-created the long-running Special Agent Pendergast series of thrillers blending forensic detective work, horror, and gothic atmosphere. A former book editor at St. Martin's Press, Child brought a strong structural and pacing sensibility to the partnership; the two met while Child was editing one of Preston's earlier nonfiction projects and went on to co-write Relic, their 1995 debut thriller about a monster stalking the American Museum of Natural History, which introduced the eccentric FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast and launched a series that has since grown past twenty novels. Beyond the Pendergast collaborations, Child has also written a solo series of technothrillers following systems-analyst troubleshooter Jeremy Logan, including Deep Storm and Terminal Freeze, which lean further into speculative and horror elements than the Preston & Child books. New readers to the joint series should start with Relic, which was adapted into the 1997 film The Relic, while Jeremy Logan newcomers should start with Deep Storm. Child continues to co-write new Pendergast novels with Preston on a regular schedule and remains one of the genre's most consistently bestselling thriller writers.