Tyrannosaur Canyon
The Wyman Ford series, Book 1
Douglas Preston
Forge Books
Fiction, Adventure/Sci-Fi/Thriller
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Tom Broadbent was just out for a backcountry ride in the New Mexico wilderness when he heard the gunshots from the nearby canyons. He finds a dying stranger who only lives long enough to press a bloody notebook into his hands and extract a promise to deliver it to the man's daughter, Robbie. Who was he, and what was he after in the canyonlands that got him killed? The only clue is the notebook, but it's just a bunch of numbers he can't make head nor tails of, and the detective on the case doesn't exactly strike Tom as up to the challenge. As he investigates, he finds himself pulled into a deadly plot involving fossil thieves, lost treasures, secret codes, cutthroat academic rivalries, a novice monk with an unusual past, a murderous ex-con on a single-minded mission, a rogue dark ops agency, and a secret dating back to the days of the dinosaurs... all of which could make for many more bodies in the New Mexico desert in the here and now.
REVIEW: The blurb promises action and intrigue and secrets set against the harsh backdrop of the New Mexico deserts, and on that level it does deliver, I'll admit. There's a definite surfeit of testosterone about the plot, the few women shunted to the side for much of the tale (though they do come into their own later, the writing and the plot can't help objectifying them to the point of eye-rolls more than once). This isn't the kind of story that runs on deep complexity or nuance. Tom's the sort of fellow who could have ridden straight out of an older Western where the white hat hero is always unquestionably on the side of morality and truth; he willingly puts his life on the line, as well as the life of his wife, all because he made a promise to a dying man and he's the kind of man who doesn't break a promise, no matter what. His wife is, of course, a knockout in the looks department who gives riding lessons to special needs children and - inevitably - needs rescuing at some point, though she does actually step up and do a little more than I'd expected of her at the start (not quite enough to be truly independent, though). Ex-con Jimson Maddox may only be an agent for another man, but he takes his duty seriously, in his own way as committed to his word as Tom is, if with far less moral fiber and being far more likely to assault and kill in pursuit of his goals. Behind Maddox is a frustrated curator at a museum with his own reasons for blurring the lines of good and evil in pursuit of what he wants... and he does not even quite know what he's waded into with this scheme until it's too late and other, even darker and deeper entities are at work. Meanwhile, Tom has found an ally in Wyman Ford, an ex-CIA agent who fled to monastic life after a tragedy (and a fridged wife, because of course); the fact that this is the first book in a series about Ford shows just how long he retains "sidekick" status before shifting to the forefront. With a skeptical detective becoming more and more suspicious of Tom's evasions (Tom not trusting the man to solve the Sunday crossword, let alone the murder of the unknown prospector in the canyon), everyone ends up in a deadly game of cat and mouse (or cats and mice) in and around the "Maze", an area of forbidding canyons and rocks and abandoned mines that can prove deadly even to experienced desert hikers. As for what everyone is after... well, the name of the book is Tyrannosaur Canyon and covers on various editions feature a prominent fossil, so that's a sizeable clue, but there's more to it than just a potentially career-making find. Indeed, there's more to it than any one player in the plot knows or understands, all the pieces slowly coming together in a story where it's clear author Preston did extensive research. It all involves, as mentioned previously, plenty of action and intrigue (and testosterone), with some betrayals and deceptions and such along the way.
All that said, it came very close to losing a half-star. For all that it is pretty much what it says it is on the cover, at times I found myself pushed out of the story, or at least shoved a little to the side. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it has something to do with how the characters tend to feel a bit flat beyond all that action, how women (when they showed up) have a way of being turned into inherently weaker, inherently objectified things and only belatedly rising as people with backbones, and how, at some point, a sense of action movie implausibility and fatigue sets in; how far can you push people beyond the limits of human endurance before even heroes of an action story fail to endure? There was also a bit of tug-of-war going on between Tom Broadbent, evidently a character from previous Douglas Preston novels (which I have not read) and Wyman Ford for alpha lead of the tale, which sometimes made the story feel like a snake with two heads; it can't possibly go in both directions it wants to go at the same time. Still, despite this (and a sense that the story might've benefited from a little trimming now and again, and the characters from a little less flat white hat/black hat characterization), I will say again that it does deliver on its promises, and I've definitely read far worse, so I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.
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