On a summer evening in 1988, Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston sat in Adirondack chairs on the front porch of Child's house, sipping single-malt Glenmorangie, gazing out over the lake, and hashing out the framework of a novel that would eventually become Relic.

The year before, when Child was still an editor at St. Martin's Press (and had recently published Preston's first book, the non-fiction Dinosaurs in the Attic), Preston submitted a proposal for a murder mystery to him, tentatively titled Zero at the Bone and set in a natural history museum. At the time, Child responded that murder mysteries were "a dime a dozen" and tended not to be commercial successes--but what about a techno-thriller, set in a museum? And what if they were to write it together?

Preston was intrigued by the idea, and in the months that followed, rough ideas were tossed back and forth. Soon, enough ideas had emerged to allow Child to draft a proposal for the novel, which he then sent to Preston for comments and revision.

"This became a common device for us. One or the other of us would write up ideas that we had discussed either in person or, more frequently, over the phone. In the course of summarizing these joint ideas, we would invariably add more ideas of our own. Then we'd send the resulting document on to the other, who'd respond either by phone or by adding inline comments to the document and returning it. It's really a kind of writing by accretion. We were feeling our way through the details of writing a book together, and by a happy process of trial and error stumbled quickly on the method that has worked best for the two of us."
--L. C.

What follows is the first working document of the first Preston-Child novel, dated July 11, 1988. Although many names, settings, and scenes are recognizable, the plot is utterly different from the completed book.