Thunderhead is a thriller novel by American writers Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

[1][2] Anthropologist Nora Kelly finds a letter that was written sixteen years ago, but mysteriously sent to her only recently.

A portion of the team learns that the city of Quivira held not gold, but micaceous, golden colored pottery, and that it also was a center for an Aztec death cult, which had enslaved the native Anasazi people.

The Aztec rulers used black magic, aided by a powder of the fungus Coccidioides immitis which could kill by causing coccidioidomycosis.

[3] Bill Smithback, the journalist hired to chronicle the expedition, previously appeared in Preston and Child's Aloysius Pendergast series, and is revealed to have achieved some level of fame based on his novelization of the events depicted in Relic and Reliquary.