Dragon Teeth

Bone Wars In The Wild West

Michael Crichton, best-selling writer, producer, director will always be remembered for his Jurassic Park books, turned into hit movies and TV series. He passed away in 2008 at the age of 66, but his latest book Dragon Teeth is just out. His wife, Sherri, discovered the  manuscript among his papers—the research notes that went into his fictional work on dinosaurs.

Dragon Teeth is a page-turner, a fictional account, set in 1876, of true events involving rival paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale University and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. The protagonist, however, is William Johnson, the spoilt son of a shipping magnate, who takes on a bet to go to the untamed West, instead of a cushy holiday in Europe. So, along with being a thriller about the scientists, Red Indians, armymen and outlaws, it is also a coming of age story

Crichton makes digging fossil bones seem adventurous and exciting, despite the heat, dust, hostile Indians and great discomfort. Johnson puts aside his usual languid state of mind to learn photography (which was not the aim and shoot affair it is now, but a cumbersome process involving glass plates and chemicals) so that he can join Marsh’s expedition to look for fossil bones in the West, where the American Army is getting a drubbing by angry Red Indians protecting their territory.

As a backdrop to the adventure is the gold rush, the debate between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the religious leaders trying to debunk it.

Marsh is so paranoid about Cope’s non-existent spies that he abandons Johnson in a fleabag hotel, where he meets Cope. The easygoing Cope takes him into his team and they proceed on their way, ignoring warnings of Indians scalping white men.

Facing storms, arrows, bullets, stampeding buffaloes and all manner of peril, Johnson does grow from a milksop to a man; and also helps make an important discovery.

One can only admire Crichton for his meticulous research; legendary names like General Custer, Sitting Bull, Wyatt and Morgan Earp, make ‘guest’ appearances. Only a master storyteller could make historical fiction so entertaining and suspenseful.

Dragon Teeth

By Michael Crichton

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages 286

The Fix

A Jigsaw Puzzle

David Badacci’s 2015 novel, The Memory Man introduced Amos Decker, a man with total recall. Now the third book inthe series—The Fix—is out, and it is as thrilling, if not more, that the earlier two books.

Years earlier, as a young football player, Decker had been blindsided in his first game and got hit on the head so violently that he was declared dead. When he was revived, something had happened inside his brain that made him “an acquired savant with hyperthymesia and synesthesia abilities.”  Which in simple terms means he never forgets anything, even if he wants to, and sees emotions in colour.

After he recovers, he goes on to become a cop, and because he has an exceptional brain, makes for a very good investigator.  But the first book begins with a horrific tragedy-- Decker returns home one night, and finds his family slaughtered—his wife, little daughter and brother-in-law.

He is so devastated that he almost takes his own life, and is prevented from pulling the trigger by his cop friends who arrive at the scene of the crime.  The shock unravels him—he gives up his job, loses his home and car, becomes a recluse, making a sparse living as a private eye. Eventually, he is pulled out of that black hole and inducted into the FBI.

In Book 3, Decker, with his best friend and supporter Alex Jamison, along with his FBI buddies Ross Bogart and Ted Milligan is settling into a job he likes, even though his past trauma never leaves him.

One day, he is witness to what seems like a random killing, right outside the Hoover Building—the FBI headquarters. Walt Dabney, a prosperous businessman and family man, shoots Anne Berkshire, for no apparent reason and then shoots himself.  The woman he killed was a schoolteacher and social worker with no connection to Dabney.  But she also seemed to lead a double life, with immense wealth and no discernible source of income.

Dabney’s wife Ellie and four daughters are shattered by thecourse of events and have no answers to the cops’ questions. They simply cannot make sense of what Dabney did—a devoted husband and loving father-- who had no reason to wreck his life.

Decker and Jamison start investigating the baffling case and with each chapter a new layer unravels. There is a sinister plan afoot, that involves espionage, spying and terrorism.

Meanwhile, the enigmatic Harper Brown and agent of theDefense Intelligence Agency (DIA) joins the investigation, starts on the wrong foot with Decker and gets Jamison’s hackles up. Decker now shares an apartment with Jamison, in a building owned by Melvin Mars from Book 2—The Last Mile.He had been pulled out of death row by Decker, after spending  twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. A grateful Mars becomes Decker’s friend for life. He drops into this book to help with the complicated and frustrating case.

Decker’s incredible memory does not really come into play tillthe explosive climax and the surprising twist, when all the tiny pieces of the jigsaw puzzle finally come together. The Fix is a very enjoyable book, with dashes of humour and also a bit of romance.

The Fix

By David Baldacci

Published by Pan MacMillan

Pages: 432

Music Of The Ghosts

Revisiting The Killing Fields

The Cambodian Civil War in the Seventies resulted in the most savage genocide in history, when followers of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killed millions of people, imprisoned and tortured many more; several—mostly children—died of malnutrition and disease.

The mass graves of the massacred population were uncovered over time, and called The Killing Fields, by journalist Dith Pran, whose experiences were was turned into a disturbing film by Roland Joffe. There have been a few other books on the Cambodian horror, but few and far between.

Vaddey Ratner, who escaped from Cambodia as a child, wrote In The Shadow of The Banyan and now a second book, Music Of The Ghosts that takes the story forward to modern-day Cambodia, still reeling with memories of the past.

The protagonist is thirty-seven-year-old Teera, who had made a miraculous escape from Cambodia, along with the only other survivor of her family, her aunt Amara. They rebuilt their lives in America, but could not shake off their tragic history.

After Amara dies of cancer, Teera receives a letter from a man who calls himself Old Musician, and tells her he has a few musical instruments belonging to her father, that he would like her to have.  It takes Teera months of coming to terms with her sorrow and mustering up the courage to go to Cambodia, to confront the loss of her roots and the never-ending grief of losing her family.

The story unravels through the memories of Teera and the Old Musician, and events in the present, which include a romance with Dr Narunn, who understands and shares Teera’s pain. It is not easy for her to go to places that were once familiar and now only have echoes of torment.

The taxi driver who takes her around, the wise monk at the temple where Old Musician lives, an orphaned child, a family of survivors finding joy in their togetherness—everything adds to Teera’s understanding of the past and the enriches the experience of her return. She notices and embraces again the Cambodian way of life, wanting to shake off the tag of foreigner in the country of her birth.

But she sees, through an outsider’s eyes, “Shantytowns fight for their inch of land against sprawling residential estates and hotel grounds, against sprouting American-style shopping malls and Chinese-style row houses. Open sewage canals — clogged with plastic bottles and bags, the blackened water a hothouse for diseases heaving in the heat and dust — hem the streets boasting modern clinics and pharmacies.”

It may be a little repetitive and the prose too florid at times, but it is a very moving book. (In a scene that raises goosebumps, a mother whose children have died before her eyes, screams for their faces to remain uncovered, so that the people who dropped the bomb can see what they have done.)

The Holocaust is never allowed to slip out of the minds of the world—there are books, films, documentaries, TV shows and plays; the tragedy of Cambodia should not be forgotten either, the unimaginable suffering of the people should not be in vain.

Music Of The Ghosts

By Vaddey Ratner

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 336