Dance of Death

Dance of Death is a thriller by the American writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, published in 2005. It is the sixth novel about the FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast and the second part of a trilogy about his brother, Diogenes.

At the end of the previous book, Brimstone, Pendergast was buried alive behind a brick wall in Castel Fosco. This one opens with Diogenes digging him out and nursing him back to health, work that Diogenes has plainly not done for his brother's sake. Constance Greene, Pendergast's ward, asks Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta to meet her, and shows him a letter Pendergast had written months before about the brother he had been writing about.

The letter gives no location for Diogenes, but it does contain the one thing Pendergast was certain of: a date. D'Agosta takes the twenty-eighth of January to be the day Diogenes has been working towards, and most of the novel is the two of them chasing that date, with a third book about Diogenes, The Book of the Dead, following the year afterwards.