The focus of my blog is to review book series and not individual novels, but writers are going to continue writing novels within a series even after I have done my review, so I plan on reviewing the individual novels as they come into circulation.   Lincoln Child just recently added book #4, The Forgotten Room, to the Jeremy Logan series.

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Lincoln Child and also his co-writer Douglas Preston are well known for their techno-thrillers. The techno-thriller is a subgenre of science fiction which means science and technology have a prominent role. In Child’s latest solo novel The Forgotten Room from the Jeremy Logan series, Child walks the fine line between science and the supernatural. Though Preston and Child’s novels often have some element of the supernatural or the paranormal, it is often subtle or aligned with a scientific explanation, but in Child’s Jeremy Logan series, the supernatural is not disguised as science but in fact parallels it.  The scientist in me doesn’t particularly like to see a lot of supernatural shenanigans in the techno-thrillers that I read mainly because it has a tendency to make my skin crawl.  That is not to say that I don’t like supernatural or paranormal behavior in the literature that I read, I just like having the realistic science musings separated from the fantastical supernatural element mainly because having the two together pushes me toward a nervous breakdown.  However, if anyone is going to pull off putting the supernatural and science together in a good techno-thriller, it would be Lincoln Child and so far, he is doing a pretty decent job of it.

The main character of The Forgotten Room is Jeremy Logan, who refers to himself as an ‘enigmalogist’, which means he studies the unexplainable. Logan has a more creditable profession as Yale University Professor of Medieval History but moonlights as an enigmalogist. In The Forgotten Room he is hired to investigate an unusual suicide of William Strachey, a computer scientist at a think tank known as the Lux. Logan has a history at the Lux, formally holding a position as a scholar there, but was told to leave because of his interest in the supernatural, which did not align well with the underlying principle behind the prestigious Lux. This poses an awkward situation for Logan, as he needs to scrutinize his former colleagues, who had previously ousted him, with an unbiased view point.

Jeremy Logan has appeared in three previous novels, Deep Storm, Terminal Freeze, and The Third Gate but it is not until The Forgotten Room do we really get to know Jeremy Logan. For this reason I like this book the most in the series as I am really beginning to like Jeremy Logan. As long as Child continues to develop this character, I think that this series will be a fun series to pursue. The Forgotten Room is a fun thriller and can be read as a standalone, as it is not dependent at all on the previous books in the series.

I would like to thank John Pitts from the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for providing me a copy of The Forgotten Room and introducing me to Jeremy Logan.

To learn more about the series check out Lincoln Child’s Jeremy Logan Series.