Still Life with Crows
Encyclopedia
Still Life with Crows is a 2003
thriller novel by Douglas Preston
and Lincoln Child
. It is the fourth novel (behind Relic (1995), Reliquary
(1997) and The Cabinet of Curiosities
(2002)) to feature FBI Special Agent Pendergast as protagonist.
after a gruesome murder occurs. With the help of local teenaged misfit Corrie Swanson, he continues to investigate as more citizens are killed. Pendergast is soon led to believe that the murderer must be a member of the community. He soon discovers that the murders are connected to an old curse.
The victim, a petty con artist and relic hunter named Sheila Swegg, was found naked in a clearing, with her neck broken. A grisly tableau around the body, consisting of crows impaled on arrows, indicates the work of a serial killer
. Pendergast surprises the police when he notices that the arrows are genuine 19th century Cheyenne artifacts, and moreover are almost impossibly well-preserved.
Pendergast shares some of these details with the editor of the town newspaper, in exchange for an overview of the town and its population. Based on his information, the editor produces a somewhat sensationalist news story, associating the murder with a local town legend, "The Curse of the Forty-Fives."
But Pendergast upsets both the Sheriff and the editor with his opinion that the killer is local to Medicine Creek, for the simple reason that the town is so isolated that no one could have entered the area from outside without being seen.
Finding it inconvenient to conduct his investigations on foot, Pendergast hires a local teenager, Corrie Swanson, to chauffeur him around in her battered AMC Gremlin
. Corrie, a Goth
who lives alone with her alcoholic
mother, is the town misfit, who has frequently been arrested for loitering. Though she is suspicious of Pendergast, she eagerly accepts his offer of $100 a day, just for her driving skills and the benefit of her familiarity with the town.
Before long, additional murders are committed, also in the corn field. Following Pendergast around, Corrie is surprised to find herself drawn into the investigation. For all their differences, Pendergast is the first person to value Corrie's abilities and entrust her with responsibility, and she unexpectedly thrives on the experience. As he explains it, her assistance is invaluable to him, since she is intimately familiar with the townspeople and their secrets, and yet, as an outsider, has no problem telling him the unvarnished truth.
The other victims found in the cornfield are likewise arranged in bizarre tableaus, but markedly different from the first one. While going over the ground, Pendergast gives Corrie a brief lecture on the classification of serial murder, and the difference between "organized" and "disorganized" killers. What is intriguing is that Medicine Creek's killer does not fall readily into either category: some of his attacks are unplanned and seemingly random, while his "organized" killings vary widely in their ritual aspects.
Corrie takes Pendergast to meet "Brushy Jim," a semi-deranged Vietnam veteran
who is an avid collector of Old West memorabilia, and the town authority on "The Curse of the Forty-Fives." Pleased to have an interested audience, Jim tells the story: the Forty-Fives were a group of Confederate Army
veterans who formed a guerilla
band after the Civil War
to hunt Native Americans
in the Kansas territory and make it "safe" for the white settlers. The Forty-Fives were both cowardly and brutal, and their modus operandi
was to attack unprotected villages and slaughter the women and children. One night, a group of Cheyenne warriors managed to ambush the Forty-Fives, appearing behind their sentries and disappearing like ghosts, after killing all of them. The Forty-Fives' leader, horribly mutilated, pronounced a curse on the land shortly before he died.
When a visiting scientist is found murdered, the Sheriff develops his own theory of the case: Medicine Creek and a neighboring town, both of which are dying economically, were competing for a contract from Kansas State University
, to plant an experimental field of genetically-engineered corn for ethanol
production. The "serial killings" must be a sham by the administration of the other town, to scare the scientist and the university away from Medicine Creek.
The Sheriff becomes so enamored of his theory that he appeals to Pendergast's regional F.B.I. superior, to have him removed from the case. Corrie is surprised, and upset, when Pendergast appears to passively accept this, and gently informs her that her services are no longer required.
Unwilling to give up, Corrie thinks over the case at home, and comes up with an interesting clue: one of the killer's victims was, unusually, boiled whole. There are few places with either the equipment or the privacy needed to do such a thing, but one is a local tourist attraction, Kraus's Kaverns. The elderly owner of a small bed-and-breakfast near the cavern entrance, Winifred Kraus, is the daughter of a Prohibition
-era bootlegger
who kept a secret still in the cave.
Determined to check out the clue herself, Corrie goes to the cave alone. But after confirming the existence of the still, she stumbles onto the entrance to a much larger cave system, and becomes hopelessly lost. She then realizes, to her horror, that the killer is in there with her.
Pendergast and the Sheriff separately reach the same conclusion about the killer's likely hiding place. They likewise stumble onto the vast cavern system and narrowly manage to save Corrie and critically wound the killer, though several of the Sheriff's deputies are killed.
After emerging from the cave, Pendergast apprehends Ms. Kraus, and explains what has been going on: during the 1930s, the young Ms. Kraus became pregnant with an illegitimate child; her father, who was a sternly religious man as well as a bootlegger, imprisoned her in the cavern for the period of her pregnancy, and that is where she bore her son, whom she named Job. Her father never allowed Job to see the light of day, but, later, after he had died, Ms. Kraus grew to like the idea of keeping her son safe and loved inside the cave. The result was a pure sociopath
, who spent the first fifty years of his life without contact with the outside world at all, or with any human being except his mother. He also became physically powerful from roaming and climbing around the caves.
Sheila Swegg, the first victim, accidentally discovered the entrance to the cave system while digging for relics (the same entrance used by the Cheyenne warriors to ambush the Forty-Fives). Job killed her, purely by accident, and then came out to explore the new world. With a child's brain inside a man's body, he had no sense of morality
, and no way of understanding the murderous nature of his "playing" with other people.
Corrie recovers from her ordeal. One night, as she is preparing for bed, Job accosts her window and begins chasing her. She narrowly avoids being killed by offering to be his "friend." Mental health authorities arrive and take Job into custody.
The discovery of the caverns beneath Medicine Creek revitalizes the town's tourist industry, saving its economy without recourse to the somewhat controversial ethanol field contract. With the money she has earned as Pendergast's assistant, Corrie prepares for a road trip to track down her father, who left the family when Corrie was very young. Corrie is not expecting any miracles, but is hoping for closure. To her amazement, Pendergast also tells her that he has endowed her with an educational trust fund to escape Medicine Creek and attend Phillips Exeter Academy
in New Hampshire
.
In a nearby sanitorium, Pendergast and Sheriff Hazen watch as Ms. Kraus is allowed to say goodbye to Job, before he is committed to another facility. Watching her read one of his favorite books to him, they realize that there was a pattern in Job's gruesome tableaus after all: he was re-creating scenes from old nursery rhymes.
2003 in literature
The year 2003 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Peter Ackroyd - The Clerkenwell Tales*Atsuko Asano - No...
thriller novel by Douglas Preston
Douglas Preston
Douglas Preston is an American author who has written seventeen popular techno-thriller and horror novels, four alone and the rest with Lincoln Child...
and Lincoln Child
Lincoln Child
Lincoln Child is an author of seventeen techno-thriller and horror novels. He often writes with Douglas Preston. Many of their novels have become bestsellers, and one, Relic, was adapted into a feature film...
. It is the fourth novel (behind Relic (1995), Reliquary
Reliquary (novel)
Reliquary is the 1997 New York Times best-selling sequel to Relic, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The legacy of the blood-maddened Mbwun lives on in "Reliquary", but the focus is shifted from the original museum setting to the tunnels beneath the streets of New York City.-Plot summary:The...
(1997) and The Cabinet of Curiosities
The Cabinet of Curiosities
The Cabinet of Curiosities is a 2002 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.-Plot summary:Dr. Nora Kelly's life as an archeologist at New York City's American Museum of Natural History becomes complicated when Aloysius X. L...
(2002)) to feature FBI Special Agent Pendergast as protagonist.
Plot
Agent Pendergast visits Medicine Creek, KansasKansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...
after a gruesome murder occurs. With the help of local teenaged misfit Corrie Swanson, he continues to investigate as more citizens are killed. Pendergast is soon led to believe that the murderer must be a member of the community. He soon discovers that the murders are connected to an old curse.
Detailed plot
A mutilated corpse is found in a cornfield in Medicine Creek, Kansas, drawing Agent Pendergast there. Since he is technically on vacation, he has no official status or resources, and is barely tolerated by the local Sheriff, Hazen.The victim, a petty con artist and relic hunter named Sheila Swegg, was found naked in a clearing, with her neck broken. A grisly tableau around the body, consisting of crows impaled on arrows, indicates the work of a serial killer
Serial killer
A serial killer, as typically defined, is an individual who has murdered three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is usually based on psychological gratification...
. Pendergast surprises the police when he notices that the arrows are genuine 19th century Cheyenne artifacts, and moreover are almost impossibly well-preserved.
Pendergast shares some of these details with the editor of the town newspaper, in exchange for an overview of the town and its population. Based on his information, the editor produces a somewhat sensationalist news story, associating the murder with a local town legend, "The Curse of the Forty-Fives."
But Pendergast upsets both the Sheriff and the editor with his opinion that the killer is local to Medicine Creek, for the simple reason that the town is so isolated that no one could have entered the area from outside without being seen.
Finding it inconvenient to conduct his investigations on foot, Pendergast hires a local teenager, Corrie Swanson, to chauffeur him around in her battered AMC Gremlin
AMC Gremlin
The AMC Gremlin is a two-door subcompact car produced in the United States and Canada by the American Motors Corporation between 1970 and 1978. AMC reduced its development and manufacturing costs by adapting a shortened Hornet platform with a Kammback-type tail...
. Corrie, a Goth
Goth subculture
The goth subculture is a contemporary subculture found in many countries. It began in England during the early 1980s in the gothic rock scene, an offshoot of the post-punk genre. The goth subculture has survived much longer than others of the same era, and has continued to diversify...
who lives alone with her alcoholic
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...
mother, is the town misfit, who has frequently been arrested for loitering. Though she is suspicious of Pendergast, she eagerly accepts his offer of $100 a day, just for her driving skills and the benefit of her familiarity with the town.
Before long, additional murders are committed, also in the corn field. Following Pendergast around, Corrie is surprised to find herself drawn into the investigation. For all their differences, Pendergast is the first person to value Corrie's abilities and entrust her with responsibility, and she unexpectedly thrives on the experience. As he explains it, her assistance is invaluable to him, since she is intimately familiar with the townspeople and their secrets, and yet, as an outsider, has no problem telling him the unvarnished truth.
The other victims found in the cornfield are likewise arranged in bizarre tableaus, but markedly different from the first one. While going over the ground, Pendergast gives Corrie a brief lecture on the classification of serial murder, and the difference between "organized" and "disorganized" killers. What is intriguing is that Medicine Creek's killer does not fall readily into either category: some of his attacks are unplanned and seemingly random, while his "organized" killings vary widely in their ritual aspects.
Corrie takes Pendergast to meet "Brushy Jim," a semi-deranged Vietnam veteran
Vietnam veteran
Vietnam veteran is a phrase used to describe someone who served in the armed forces of participating countries during the Vietnam War.The term has been used to describe veterans who were in the armed forces of South Vietnam, the United States armed forces, and countries allied to them, whether or...
who is an avid collector of Old West memorabilia, and the town authority on "The Curse of the Forty-Fives." Pleased to have an interested audience, Jim tells the story: the Forty-Fives were a group of Confederate Army
Confederate States Army
The Confederate States Army was the army of the Confederate States of America while the Confederacy existed during the American Civil War. On February 8, 1861, delegates from the seven Deep South states which had already declared their secession from the United States of America adopted the...
veterans who formed a guerilla
Guerrilla warfare
Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare and refers to conflicts in which a small group of combatants including, but not limited to, armed civilians use military tactics, such as ambushes, sabotage, raids, the element of surprise, and extraordinary mobility to harass a larger and...
band after the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
to hunt Native Americans
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
in the Kansas territory and make it "safe" for the white settlers. The Forty-Fives were both cowardly and brutal, and their modus operandi
Modus operandi
Modus operandi is a Latin phrase, approximately translated as "mode of operation". The term is used to describe someone's habits or manner of working, their method of operating or functioning...
was to attack unprotected villages and slaughter the women and children. One night, a group of Cheyenne warriors managed to ambush the Forty-Fives, appearing behind their sentries and disappearing like ghosts, after killing all of them. The Forty-Fives' leader, horribly mutilated, pronounced a curse on the land shortly before he died.
When a visiting scientist is found murdered, the Sheriff develops his own theory of the case: Medicine Creek and a neighboring town, both of which are dying economically, were competing for a contract from Kansas State University
Kansas State University
Kansas State University, commonly shortened to K-State, is an institution of higher learning located in Manhattan, Kansas, in the United States...
, to plant an experimental field of genetically-engineered corn for ethanol
Ethanol
Ethanol, also called ethyl alcohol, pure alcohol, grain alcohol, or drinking alcohol, is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid. It is a psychoactive drug and one of the oldest recreational drugs. Best known as the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, it is also used in thermometers, as a...
production. The "serial killings" must be a sham by the administration of the other town, to scare the scientist and the university away from Medicine Creek.
The Sheriff becomes so enamored of his theory that he appeals to Pendergast's regional F.B.I. superior, to have him removed from the case. Corrie is surprised, and upset, when Pendergast appears to passively accept this, and gently informs her that her services are no longer required.
Unwilling to give up, Corrie thinks over the case at home, and comes up with an interesting clue: one of the killer's victims was, unusually, boiled whole. There are few places with either the equipment or the privacy needed to do such a thing, but one is a local tourist attraction, Kraus's Kaverns. The elderly owner of a small bed-and-breakfast near the cavern entrance, Winifred Kraus, is the daughter of a Prohibition
Prohibition in the United States
Prohibition in the United States was a national ban on the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol, in place from 1920 to 1933. The ban was mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and the Volstead Act set down the rules for enforcing the ban, as well as defining which...
-era bootlegger
Rum-running
Rum-running, also known as bootlegging, is the illegal business of transporting alcoholic beverages where such transportation is forbidden by law...
who kept a secret still in the cave.
Determined to check out the clue herself, Corrie goes to the cave alone. But after confirming the existence of the still, she stumbles onto the entrance to a much larger cave system, and becomes hopelessly lost. She then realizes, to her horror, that the killer is in there with her.
Pendergast and the Sheriff separately reach the same conclusion about the killer's likely hiding place. They likewise stumble onto the vast cavern system and narrowly manage to save Corrie and critically wound the killer, though several of the Sheriff's deputies are killed.
After emerging from the cave, Pendergast apprehends Ms. Kraus, and explains what has been going on: during the 1930s, the young Ms. Kraus became pregnant with an illegitimate child; her father, who was a sternly religious man as well as a bootlegger, imprisoned her in the cavern for the period of her pregnancy, and that is where she bore her son, whom she named Job. Her father never allowed Job to see the light of day, but, later, after he had died, Ms. Kraus grew to like the idea of keeping her son safe and loved inside the cave. The result was a pure sociopath
Antisocial personality disorder
Antisocial personality disorder is described by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition , as an Axis II personality disorder characterized by "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood...
, who spent the first fifty years of his life without contact with the outside world at all, or with any human being except his mother. He also became physically powerful from roaming and climbing around the caves.
Sheila Swegg, the first victim, accidentally discovered the entrance to the cave system while digging for relics (the same entrance used by the Cheyenne warriors to ambush the Forty-Fives). Job killed her, purely by accident, and then came out to explore the new world. With a child's brain inside a man's body, he had no sense of morality
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
, and no way of understanding the murderous nature of his "playing" with other people.
Corrie recovers from her ordeal. One night, as she is preparing for bed, Job accosts her window and begins chasing her. She narrowly avoids being killed by offering to be his "friend." Mental health authorities arrive and take Job into custody.
The discovery of the caverns beneath Medicine Creek revitalizes the town's tourist industry, saving its economy without recourse to the somewhat controversial ethanol field contract. With the money she has earned as Pendergast's assistant, Corrie prepares for a road trip to track down her father, who left the family when Corrie was very young. Corrie is not expecting any miracles, but is hoping for closure. To her amazement, Pendergast also tells her that he has endowed her with an educational trust fund to escape Medicine Creek and attend Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...
in New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...
.
In a nearby sanitorium, Pendergast and Sheriff Hazen watch as Ms. Kraus is allowed to say goodbye to Job, before he is committed to another facility. Watching her read one of his favorite books to him, they realize that there was a pattern in Job's gruesome tableaus after all: he was re-creating scenes from old nursery rhymes.
Continuity
- While waiting for Pendergast, Corrie occupies herself with a paperback novel called Beyond the Ice Limit, a fictional sequel to Preston and Child's novel, The Ice LimitThe Ice LimitThe Ice Limit is a 2000 techno-thriller novel by authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.-Plot summary:Meteorite hunter Nestor Masangkay arrives on Isla Desolación, a small island near Cape Horn in Chile, tracking a possible meteorite. Using a tomgraphic scanner, Masangkay confirms that not only...
. - There are several references to the events of the previous novel, The Cabinet of CuriositiesThe Cabinet of CuriositiesThe Cabinet of Curiosities is a 2002 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.-Plot summary:Dr. Nora Kelly's life as an archeologist at New York City's American Museum of Natural History becomes complicated when Aloysius X. L...
:- Wren, the mysterious denizen of the New York Public LibraryNew York Public LibraryThe New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
, reappears, engaged in cataloguing the extensive natural history collections found in the Beaux Arts mansion of Pendergast's ancestor, Antoine Pendergast (a.k.a. Enoch Leng) that were discovered in Cabinet; - In giving Corrie her scholarship, Pendergast confides that he recently came into an inheritance from an "old relative," who did not obtain his money by good works. This is likely a reference to Antoine/Enoch.
- Wren, the mysterious denizen of the New York Public Library
- This novel also foreshadows the events of the subsequent novel, Brimstone:
- Wren makes the first reference to Pendergast's brother, Diogenes, who becomes a major character in the next three novels;
- Constance Greene, who appears prominently in the next three novels, is also introduced, as an unidentified figure watching Wren from the recessess of the mansion.
- Corrie makes a brief appearance in the subsequent Preston/Child book Dance of DeathDance of Death (novel)Dance of Death is a 2005 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It is the second book in a trilogy: the first book is Brimstone, released in 2004, and the last book is The Book of the Dead, released in 2006.-Synopsis:...
, in which F.B.I. Agents remove her from Exeter to Australia, for her protection, while Pendergast and his close friends are being stalked by his brother, Diogenes. - The following novel, The Book of the DeadThe Book of the Dead (novel)The Book of the Dead is a novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. It is the third and final installment to the trilogy concentrating on FBI Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast and his relationship with Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta in their pursuit to stop Pendergast's brother,...
, ends with a letter, purportedly written by Corrie to Preston and Child, telling them that she has graduated Exeter and plans to spend a year in New York City, working and learning, before attending university at NYUNew York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. - Corrie also appears in the 2011 novel Cold Vengeance in a minor supporting role.