Bloodless is the 21st installment in the Agent Pendergast series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Pendergast and his FBI partner Agent Coldmoon are directed to investigate a series of murders in Savannah, Georgia, where the killer is leaving the victims exsanguinated. Delving into local history, Pendergast finds a connection between the recent killings and an unsolved plane hijacking from 1971.
Tropes
- Asshole Victim: Betts, Moller and Senator Drayton all count.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Miss Frost's history before she became proprietress of The Chandler hotel is a matter of local speculation and gossip. Turns out, she was the hijacker of the Boeing 727 who vanished after parachuting out of the plane in 1971.
- Did They or Didn't They?: Coldmoon notes that Pendergast and Constance are sharing a suite of rooms and (representing the readers) wonders what's going on between them. It is Implied that Pendergast and Constance have not consummated their relationship because Pendergast is not sure about taking that step. Pendergast's reluctance to start a sexual relationship with her contributes to Constance deciding to leave him and travel back in time to save her sister at the end of the book.
- Future Shadowing: The device enables this. Miss Frost and Patrick Ellerby made their money by looking at share market movements in the future. Eventually Pendergast and co also use the device to foresee the havoc that the Creature would wreak if not stopped.
- Greed: This is indirectly responsible for the serial killings: had Patrick Ellerby been content with making smaller profits on the share market and not tried to upgrade the device to see further into the future, there wouldn't have been a sufficiently large time-space portal to allow the Creature to enter this world.
- Heroic BSoD: Pendergast enters one after Constance leaves him.
- Insectoid Aliens: This is what is responsible for the exsanguinations.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Moller's evil-detecting silver probe. It's possible that the probe is every bit as phoney as his camera, but both the times that he claimed it was detecting evil coincided with the Creature having attacked / about to attack.
- Never the Obvious Suspect: You would think that a satanist cult that practices blood rituals would be the obvious candidate for murders where the victims are exsanguinated.
- The One That Got Away: "A.R" and "Z.Q." to each other. Neither marry despite having parted over 50 years ago.
- Samus Is a Girl: Turns out that Ms. Frost was D.B. Cooper, the skyjacker of Flight 305.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: this is Constance’s motive for travelling to the past at the end of the novel: she wants to try and save her sister from her fate as described in The Cabinet of Curiosities.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: D B Cooper's hijacking of Boeing 727, followed by his mysterious disappearance, happened in Real Life.
- Worthy Adversary: Miss Frost acknowledges Constance to be one.
