A chill of intrigue: Douglas Preston's 'The Lost Tomb' a collection of 13 of his nonfiction articles

Dec. 11—To Douglas Preston, it's all storytelling, whether he's writing long-form journalism or novels.

Preston, a longtime Santa Fe resident, has had a successful, productive career in both literary arenas for more than half a century. Some novels he cowrote with Lincoln Child.

Preston's latest book is a collection of 13 previously published magazine-length nonfiction articles. The collection is titled "The Lost Tomb and Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder."

The title is a dead give away. The stories share the chill of intrigue or mystery. Or both.

"The Lost Tomb," the lead story appearing at the back of the book, is about a late 20th century American archaeologist's discovery of an ancient Egyptian tomb never seen before in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

It was immense, and T-shaped, with at least 76 rooms, with side chambers, suites and descending passages.

Preston's story was originally published in the New Yorker in 1996. In an end-of-story update, Preston writes that 120 rooms have been discovered; but the burial chambers have not yet been found.

The first tale, "A Buried Treasure," is personal for Preston. It's about Petey Anderson, Preston's best friend growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

When they were 8 years old, they stowed objects in a cookie tin and buried it. They agreed to dig it up 10 years later. Petey moved to New Jersey in seventh grade.

Preston couldn't wait a decade. He went digging for the tin when he was 16. Alas, no luck. Years passed and one day Preston was killing time on the internet. So he did a search for his old friend. So many Pete Andersons.

But a hit about a murder of a Peter Anderson reported in a Trenton, New Jersey, newspaper stirred Preston's curiosity. He learned that the Peter Anderson killed was indeed his friend Petey. Preston's article is about their childhood friendship, Petey's death and the pall of sadness hovering over Preston; he didn't want to know more about the trial, of Petey's killer, nor of Petey's life as an adult.

"A Buried Treasure" originally appeared in Wired magazine in 2019 as "The Lost Trail."

A story of unexplained deaths is "The Skiers at Dead Mountain." Igor Dyatlov organized a 16-day ski trip for a group of friends in the Ural Mountains, a range separating Russia and Siberia. It was the late 1950s and Dyatlov wanted the expedition to celebrate "the boldness and vigor of a new Soviet generation," Preston writes.

The group set out but did not return. Search parties were organized.

Five bodies were initially found. A homicide investigation was begun.

"Something had happened that induced the skiers to cut their way out of the tent and flee into the night, into a howling blizzard, in 20-below zero temperatures, in bare feet or socks," Preston writes.

Months later, with snow melting, a hunter and his dog came upon four more bodies in a makeshift snow den.

Many theories, including conspiracy theories, about the mysterious cause of death abounded. The case was reopened, then closed again.

In an end-of-story update, Preston writes that since his original article in the New Yorker in 2021 no new noteworthy information has come to light.

New Mexico is prominent in several tales.

One is "The Mystery of Sandia Cave." At the swirling center of this mystery is the late Frank Hibben and his "discovery" of what he said was a cave in the Sandia Mountains that held evidence of the oldest human culture in the New World. Hibben reported that find in May 1940 when he was a scholar at the University of New Mexico. Preston's article was originally published in the New Yorker in 1995. In it, several fellow archaeologists disputed the veracity of Hibben's Sandia Cave find. "It's been thoroughly discredited," Preston said in a recent interview.

Another story in the collection partially set in New Mexico carries the foreboding title "Cannibals of the Canyon." A focus is on physical anthropologist Christy Turner's lengthy studies of the prehistoric Anasazi, known today as the Ancient Puebloans. The center of their "cultural flowering" seems to have been at Chaco Canyon in the San Juan Basin in northwest New Mexico between the 10th and 12th centuries.

Preston writes that findings suggest they were farmers who excelled in art, architecture and engineering. And it appeared Chaco society was utopian — no rich, no poor, no rulers. Government by consensus.

But according to Preston's 1998 article in the New Yorker, Turner has identified Anasazi sites he thinks are "charnel deposits" — mounds of cannibalized remains, with most of the Anasazi deposits at Chaco Great Houses.

In his update, Preston said no clear answer has emerged on the cause of the cannibalism nor reasons for the demise of Chaco civilization.