Cemetery Dance is a thriller novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child released on May 12, 2009 by Grand Central Publishing.

After celebrating their first anniversary, William Smithback, a reporter for The New York Times, and his wife Nora Kelly, a Museum of Natural History archeologist, return home from a romantic dinner.

Kelly slips out to pick up a pastry from the local shop, but upon her return to their apartment in the Upper West side of Manhattan, she finds the door ajar, Smithback dead, and is attacked as she approaches.

The twist: the man that witnesses believe is Smithback's murderer was pulled from the river dead, after committing suicide, two weeks before the attack.

Their serpentine journey takes them into a part of Manhattan they never imagined could exist: a secretive and deadly hotbed of Obeah, the West Indian Zombi cult of sorcery and magic.

Nora heads to The Ville in upper Harlem, the place Bill thought was the main source of animal sacrifice in NYC.

After this, Nora attends the Gotham Press Club awards, where she sees her husband, zombie-like, attack Caitlyn Kidd with a knife, killing her.

D’Agosta goes to the Ville, interviews an old woman who heard animal noises, then goes into the property and is attacked by someone: possibly Fearing.

Pendergast summons Monsieur Bertin, while he and Vinnie go to City Hall to start proceedings to evict the squatters in the Ville.

Lucas Kline donates money to the NYPD to get Hayward removed from a task force she was supposed to be appointed to.

Kids smoking weed near the Ville stumble across a body that seems to be Colin Fearing, but the corpse is fresh, killed by a bullet to the head.

Marty Wartek, the Housing Authority bureaucrat, is murdered after making an announcement that the city has begun eviction proceedings against the Ville.

This stirs up the populace, and Richard Plock begins to organize a large protest march, wherein he hopes to forcibly remove the people living in the Ville and free their animals.

However, Plock has planned for a bunch of small, separate gathering places for people, and when they come together, they form a huge group that completely overwhelms the police presence.

As they are chasing him through his extensive basements, he accidentally chops off his own head with a guillotine that he has kept, along with many other props from movies that he has directed.

They then lobotomized him, making him impervious to pain, free of moral restraints, extremely violent, yet submissive to its masters.

Lucas Kline, it turns out, was being recorded by the FBI when he bribed Commissioner Rocker to remove Captain Hayward from the task force.

Nora returns to New Mexico to scatter her husband’s ashes in a river where they had met and begun to fall in love with each other.