52 in 25: #32 - Tyrannosaur Canyon

I was really wanting to read some Tom Clancy, one of my favorite authors, so I started to reread Cardinal in the Kremlin, which I haven’t read in a while, but then I realized it is not summer reading.  I want “summer reading.”  So I put it down and will probably pick it up again in the winter.

 

Instead, I returned to Douglas Preston, whose Extinction is #16.  I turned to another “dinosaur” themed book in Tyrannosaur Canyon.  I’ll cut to the chase, there is a dinosaur in it, but barely.

 

It actually starts with the Apollo 17 lunar landing in 1972.  Ok, I’m listening.  Something mysterious happens.  Jump to present day, where a “treasure hunter” in the badlands of New Mexico is murdered.  Before the bad guy can get to his body (he was shot from the top of the canyon), the hero, Tom Broadbent, heard the shots and finds the body.  Before the man dies, he hands Tom a diary and tells him to give it to his daughter Robbie.  Being a man of honor, he has to honor the man’s last request, and so he does not take it to the authorities.  Thus begins a race to find out what the treasure is and where it’s buried.  Along the way, Tom befriends a former CIA agent-turned-monk Wyman Ford.  I mention that because this is the second Tom Broadbent novel (I haven’t read the first The Codex, but it’s basically spoiled in this book) and the first of the Wyman Ford series of books).

 

Where does the dinosaur come in?  Spoilers.  The “treasure” is a basically fully intact T-Rex, including skin and everything, which turns out to have died during the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs but, twist, it actually died from an alien organism that was attached to the asteroid, was also found on the moon, and could become a dangerous weapon.  Basically, you have a little bit of a treasure hunt, a little bit of a detective story, a little bit of a conspiracy story, and a little bit of Andromeda Strain.

 

Overall, it was enjoyable.  I definitely realized that I really like the “serial” type of novel, from Dumas to Burroughs and Crichton (sort of) to now Preston.  He reminds me quite a bit of Crichton, but with a lot fewer scientific details to lend it more credibility.  In the end, he writes a fun, engaging thriller that keeps you coming back to find out what’s happening to the different convergent story lines.  That being said, I will no longer assume that a book with a dinosaur or other extinct animal on its cover features dinosaurs or other extinct animals.  As a man once said, "fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again."