Douglas Preston, “Lost City of the Monkey God,” 2017

Encore podcast first posted March 12, 2017.

Douglas Preston, author of “The Lost City of the Monkey God” in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios, January 13, 2017.

Douglas Preston has written several works of fiction and non-fiction, including a best-selling series of thrillers co-written with Lincoln Child (the Agent Pendergast series). In his latest work of non-fiction, Preston delves into the story of a lost city in Honduras, in Mosquitia, and a civilization that vanished after the Spanish came to the Americas.

His story involves con men and crooks who spent decades looking for the city, then turns to a documentarian who became obsessed and eventually took state of the art equipment to discover whether such a city exists. In fact, he found two, and Douglas Preston was there. Still later, in 2015, Preston went on an expedition into the jungle to see what remains of the ruins, and while there contracted a rare and often fatal tropical disease which is currently in remission.

This interview also contains an overview of Preston’s writing career, including a look at the process in which he and Lincoln Child create the Pendergast books. Since this interview, four Pendergast novels have been published with a fifth scheduled for 2023, one book in the Gideon Crew series, and three in a new series featuring Nora Kelly. “The Lost City of the Monkey God” remains his most recent non-fiction work.

Douglas Preston website

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