Plot Summary
In and around a fictionalized version of New York City's American Museum of Natural History, a few select characters must solve a string of brutal murders that take place inside the museum during the days preceding the opening of "Superstition", a spectacular blockbuster exhibition.
Evidence begins to point suspiciously to a doomed expedition undertaken by the museum several years earlier to the Brazilian rainforest in search of the lost Kothoga tribe. It becomes apparent that behind the murders is Mbwun (translation: "He Who Walks On All Fours")—the Kothoga's crazed lizard god, whose father happens to be a demon analogous to Satan, according to Kothoga legend. A relic depicting Mbwun is to be shown for the first time at the upcoming exhibition.
It also appears that several museum leaders had known about previous murders on the museum's premises and that they had conspired to keep these murders a secret so as not to damage the reputation of the museum.
Read more about this topic: Relic (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)