Douglas Preston is an American thriller writer and journalist, best known for the Agent Pendergast novels he writes with Lincoln Child. He has also written solo thrillers, including the Wyman Ford series, and non-fiction books such as “The Monster of Florence” and “The Lost City of the Monkey God”.
Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Wellesley. After graduating from Pomona College he worked from 1978 to 1985 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as a writer, editor and manager of publications. His history of the museum, “Dinosaurs in the Attic”, was edited at St. Martin’s Press by Lincoln Child, and the two went on to write a thriller set in the museum. “Relic” was published in 1995 and filmed by Paramount in 1997. Preston moved to New Mexico in 1986 to write full time.
FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast is a supporting character in “Relic” and “Reliquary” and takes the lead from “The Cabinet of Curiosities” (2002). Preston and Child have also written the Gideon Crew series and the Nora Kelly novels, which pair the archaeologist Nora Kelly with FBI Agent Corrie Swanson.
His first solo novel, “Jennie” (1994), is about a chimpanzee adopted by an American family and was filmed for the Disney Channel as “The Jennie Project” (2001). “The Codex” and “Tyrannosaur Canyon” followed, the second introducing the former CIA agent Wyman Ford, who returns in “Blasphemy”, “Impact” and “The Kraken Project”. “Extinction” (2024) began the Cash and Colcord series, and its sequel “Paradox” (2026) was written with his daughter, Aletheia Preston.
Much of his non-fiction comes from his own expeditions. “Cities of Gold” retraces Coronado’s route across the American Southwest on horseback. “The Monster of Florence” (2008), written with the Italian journalist Mario Spezi, covers an unsolved series of murders near Florence and became a Netflix miniseries in 2025. “The Lost City of the Monkey God” (2017), a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, describes a 2015 expedition to a pre-Columbian city in the Mosquitia mountains of Honduras. Preston was elected president of the Authors Guild in 2019.
His most recent books are “Pendergast: The Beginning” (January 2026), an origin story for the series, and “Paradox” (April 2026). The next Nora Kelly novel, “Dead Man’s Journey”, is scheduled for January 2027.
