The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

DOUGLAS PRESTON and LINCOLN CHILD

Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956. He graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, anthropology, geology, astronomy, and English. He worked at New York ’s American Museum of Natural History for eight years as writer and editor of the in-house publication, eventually writing the nonfiction book Dinosaurs in the Attic for St. Martin ’s Press, where his editor was Lincoln Child. They formed a friendship that resulted in their coauthoring the bestselling FBI Agent Pendergast series and other novels.

Lincoln Child was born in Westport, Connecticut, in 1957. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, majoring in English. He took a job with St. Martin ’s in 1979 and, after editing more than a hundred books and founding the company’s horror division, left in 1987 for a position with MetLife as a programmer and systems analyst. His first collaborative novel with Preston, Relic, was published in 1995.

Preston and Child have collaborated on thirteen novels, nine about Pendergast and four stand-alones: Mount Dragon (1996), Riptide (1998), Thunderhead (1999), and The Ice Limit (2000).

On his own, Child has written the thrillers Utopia (2002), Death Match (2004), Deep Storm (2007), and Terminal Freeze (2009).

Preston’s solo works are Dinosaurs in the Attic (1985), Jennie (1994), The Royal Road with José Antonio Esquibel and photographs by Christine Preston (1998), Cities of Gold (1999), The Codex (2004), Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005), Blasphemy (2008), and Monster of Florence with Mario Spezi (2008).