On Claw Tub

So I finished The Cabinet of Curiosities by two authors recently, and was pretty impressed as I was reading, but somehow lost it at the end. It does well at setting up a background of the past, back when people still took a bath in a claw tub, but somehow the suspense got lost in the present. It did have an interesting background of natural history displays -- cabinets of curiosity -- in the late 1880s, though they got put in the American Museum of Natural History, and that background was very interesting. The romance between the archeologist and the New York Times reporter didn't congeal for me. I never figured out Pendergast, an independently wealthy FBI agent who just comes along, and discovers the truth, because it's related to his family.