Special Agent Pendergast takes a break from his own series to make a brief, consequential appearance. The two women are smart, likable characters, but readers ought not to take their survival for granted. Yet the clever plot suggests a dark secret that lies within the bones they find. Neither has a personal interest in gold they can’t legally possess, but others may. Of course, villainy is afoot that may snuff out Kelly's and Swanson’s young lives. As they get closer to where the Lost Camp might be, members of their expedition begin to die, and a serious storm approaches that threatens to cause a deadly avalanche. Other members of the team hear rumors of the gold, and tragedy strikes. Kelly and Swanson work together in a mildly testy relationship, but they’re really both pros. Meanwhile, newly minted FBI Special Agent Corinne Swanson is assigned the case of “a dead body in a vandalized grave.” Turns out there are four grave robberies, all of descendants of the Donner disaster. The old bones they expect to find will have important historical significance, but Benton also confides that there may be gold coins worth $20 million hidden near the camp.

Benton asks Kelly for her expertise in finding and studying the camp. Now, historian Clive Benton has the original journal of Tamzene Donner, whose body was eaten. In 1846, westbound travelers became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, and in “one of the greatest calamities of the westward migration,” some resorted to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to survive. Young archaeologist Nora Kelly joins a perilous search for the Lost Camp of the Donner Party in this latest collaboration by Preston and Child ( Verses for the Dead, 2018, etc.).

A ferry of bones and gold