Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Gone Fishing features one of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's favorite characters, Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, of the New York City Police Department: a working‑class cop from Queens with a heart as big as the ocean. D'Agosta made his debut in the team's first thriller, The Relic, alongside their famous Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI. In the Paramount film made from that novel, Pendergast was cut from the story entirely, leaving Vincent D'Agosta (played by Tom Sizemore) as the unrivaled star. It was the character's fifteen minutes of fame, so to speak‑and events in D'Agosta's life seemed to go downhill from there.

After reappearing in Reliquary, the sequel to The Relic, D'Agosta disappeared for six years (and five novels). Disappointed at not making precinct captain, D'Agosta quit the force and moved with his family to a small town in British Columbia to live his dream: writing crime fiction. He published two highly regarded novels that didn't sell. Desperate, broke, and separated from his wife, he moved back to New York to reclaim his old job, only to discover the NYPD was under a hiring freeze. He ended up a lowly sergeant in the Southampton, Long Island, police department, chasing beer‑swilling teenagers and loose dogs in a dune buggy. His break came when the sleazy art critic Jeremy Grove was found burned to death in his Southampton mansion. D'Agosta's work on the case, alongside his old friend Agent Pendergast, won him back his position in the ranks of the NYPD‑a story recounted in Preston and Child's thriller, Brimstone.

Gone Fishing is the first short story Preston and Child have written together, and the first time D'Agosta appears without Pendergast. The story begins with the theft of a priceless Inca sacrificial knife from the Museum of Natural History and ends twenty‑four hours later in a clearing in the woods of northern New Hampshire, amidst a scene of transcendental horror.