Brimstone is a thriller novel written by American authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and published on August 3, 2004, by Warner Books.
This is the fifth installment in the Special Agent Pendergast series and the first novel in the Diogenes trilogy that also includes Dance of Death (2005) and The Book of the Dead (2006).
During the course of unraveling the mystery, the truth behind a priceless, missing Stradivarius violin is revealed and a potentially apocalyptic riot with Messianic Christians is averted.
When the investigation begins, “Sergeant” D’Agosta of the Southampton police discovers Pendergast wandering the beach near the murder site.
D’Agosta went to Canada to write a book, but then ran out of money and had to go back to being a cop and couldn’t get a job in NYC.
Nigel Cutforth, rich record producer and friend of Grove, cooks in his penthouse apartment.
Locke Bullard is aboard his yacht, and connects with a hitman named Vasquez, whom he hires for $2 million to kill Pendergast.
The body of Beckmann leads Pendergast and D’Agosta to Florence, where they believe Bullard is also heading.
He attends an ad-hoc gathering of the Reverend Buck, a born again ex-con that arrived in NYC one day earlier, because he read Harriman’s story in the Post.
Bullard removes an item from his highly secure lab in Italy, and does a demonic summoning at his home, which used to belong to Machiavelli.
He had been partially burned, then shot, and Pendergast wants to exhume the body, but official means would take too long.
They find some melted metal in the body, leading to their theory that Vanni was a test case for the current killer, before he perfected his burning technique.
Pendergast and Vinny head to a Tuscan island, Capraia, to find Lady Viola Maskelene.
And then, much later, he discovered that Bullard had acquired the violin, and planned to destroy it so that he could analyze the resin, to help the Chinese develop missiles that could defeat American radar.
He used the other deaths to scare Bullard, convincing him that he must undo the deal he made with the Devil 30 years earlier, and that to do so he needed to sacrifice something of immense value.