Center for Teaching & Learning

This book is about a monster that gets loose in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. It was taken back there from an archeological expedition to Brazil on a boat full of other artifacts. The monster then escapes into the museum’s vast basements and storage rooms and starts preying on unfortunate individuals who wander the museum late at night…and devouring their brains.
The monster is extremely fast, its bones are too thick to shoot through, and it’s very aggressive. The museum is opening a brand new exhibition on superstitions, in disregard to the fact that bodies keep showing up all over the museum. And on the exhibition’s opening night, the monster strikes again, causing the museum to go into lockdown mode and trapping everything—and everyone—inside.
Relic introduces the characters of special agent Aloysius Pendergast, a freelancing FBI agent from New Orleans, and Vincent D’Agosta, an Italian-American Lieutenant working for the NYPD.
Aloysius Pendergast is the perfect FBI agent. He is calm and collected, and you get the feeling that he is much, MUCH more than he appears to be. He has an almost inhuman sophistication, and his skill at getting exactly what he wants, where he wants it, when he wants it, is formidable. He doesn’t always play by the rules, but he always gets to the bottom of the case.
D’Agosta is the more ordinary of the two, but he is still amazingly good at what he does. He still gets annoyed and angry when the case isn’t going anywhere, but he really cares about what he does and never gets flustered or confused. He isn’t easily intimidated, and he doesn’t mind risking his life for what he does.
I would recommend this thriller to readers who enjoy a lot of action, plot twist, and suspense in what they read. Relic is pretty graphic, so I would say that I would recommend it only to ages 12+.
Overall, I would rate this book a 10/10.
Isaac