Tyrannosaur Canyon
by Douglas Preston
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Book Summary Information
Author: Douglas PrestonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2005-08-23
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Forge Books
Book Reviews of Tyrannosaur Canyon
Book Review: A Good, but not Great Read
Summary: 3 Stars
Others have detailed the plot of this novel in their reviews, so I will not go into that in mine. Rather, I would like to give potential readers the pros and cons of the book, the way I see them.
Overall, I think this book is a good, average to slightly above average thriller, with certain technical and genre issues that cause it to be a lower quality novel than it could have been. Here is why I say that...
On the Pro side...
1. The characters are engaging and you come to care about them. I found that the good characterization was what really brought me into the novel.
2. While there are a few slow spots, the overall pace of the book is good for a thriller.
3. The story is interesting and you want to find out what happens.
On the Con side...
1. This book is somewhat schizophrenic. In my opinion, it really doesn't know what it wants to be. It's basically a technothriller with elements of a political thriller and a woman in jeopardy thriller rolled in, and they don't seem to fit (at least to me). As I read the book, I felt like the author threw together these three genre without any thought to how they intermeshed. In some ways, it was like reading three different books in one, with their only connection being the dinosaur. While some authors weave differing stories together, they usually do so in such a way that the stories are interlinked and weaved together as the book progresses. I did not get that sense here. I think the author would have been better served to drop the political thriller part, which comes to the fore near the end of the book, and concentrate on the main story, with the New York piece as the "B" story line.
2. There are some technical errors in the book. Most people would never notice them, but for those of us who catch such things, they drive us nuts. For example, at one point, one of the characters notices that another has been looking at a fossile trilobite and mentions that it's a Cenozoic specimen. For the record, trilobites lived during almost all of (and died out at the end of) the Paleozoic era, some 185 million years before the Cenozoic era began.
3. There are some fairly subtle logical issues that tend to be disconcerting to those of use who catch them. I don't remember the specific examples, though there were several and they were rather disconcerting at the time I read them.
In conclusion, this is the kind of book I would read on the beach or in other situations where I wanted to read something, but didn't expect much other than some fairly fun distraction from what I was reading.
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