THE DINOSAUR HUNTER--Not Turok, Though
Wanted to set expectations properly, there.
I read comics now. One day I heard there were Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter comics and I remembered the Nintendo games from Back In the Day, so I looked up the comics. Didn’t find the comics. Instead I found this book, which I almost dismissed, until I saw the author’s name.
Homer Hickam was the main character from the Joe Johnston movie October Sky, starring That One Actor and That Other Actor, along with Jurassic Park Lady and Spider-Man’s Landlord. Seriously, the whole casting call was “Dudes you’ve seen in stuff but don’t know their names.” Oh and also Jake Gyllenhaal, before he started doing illicit cowboy adultery movies, but I digress.
Oddly enough, ‘cowboy’ and ‘adultery’ are also search terms that would lead you to this Homer Hickam novel, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Pitch
I’d call this book a “store-brand Longmire novel.” Longmire is a series about a small-town sheriff in Wyoming who deals with Mountain West rural stuff, often murders, and it’s awesome. THE DINOSAUR HUNTER is similarly set out west in Montana, in a ranching community where BLM owns most of the land (not the racist BLM, the other one.)
You’ve got a cast of typical yet varied small-town characters who do come off better than just being caricatures of small-town America. More on them in a minute. The plot centers one one of the ranches, called Square Sea, and how they find dinosaur bones in one of their buttes. Haha. Calm down, Jake. A butte is a mountain-thingy.
There was also a Longmire novel with this premise but it came along after this one did, not that I think Craig Johnson was riffing on it. Ranchers supplementing their income with fossil hunting is a known practice, and there was even a Discovery Channel show about it a few years ago. Like anything valuable, fossils will attract shady dealers and aggressive thieves, and that’s what happens here.
An extremely rare discovery is made and the ranchers have to navigate new waters while also balancing their desire to remain small and independent. Things get complicated when dead bodies start turning up though—at first cattle, and later, people.
The Setting
The geography of modern Montana is a character unto itself. Wide, empty land, often dry and uneven, hilly, and prone to random violent storms. Mud everywhere, and not just splashy mud, gooey mud. Sticks to everything. Breaks vehicles. They call it gumbo locally. Hickam does well to bring the setting to life with his vivid descriptions, but he also maintains good word economy, and doesn’t spend three pages describing a sunset.
The people in this setting are even more relevant though. The ranchers clash with the local, state, and federal government over who the land belongs to. Federal interest groups come in from big cities to boss the ranches around. Manners between ranchers are polite yet tense as everyone is protective of their own land. Everyone’s working all the time and they’re mostly broke but they love their way of life.
I appreciated the fact that it was a mostly moral society, too. Yeah there were adults having affairs and stuff, but it had a negative social impact and people only hid it because they didn’t want it celebrated, and it factored into the story. Youths weren’t running off to have sex in the back seat of a car. Adults weren’t shacking up because they had a duty to set an example.
The morality factor matters not just for its own sake, but because it intensifies the presence of an immoral act or character. When bad guys roll up to a good place to do bad things, it hits harder.
The Characters
Our main man and first-person narrator is Mike, a former LAPD officer and private detective who took a bullet and decided he was done being a copper, so he cashed out and moved to cowboy country where he met the Coulter family. I assume that’s the spelling, I did the audiobook. Bill Coulter was a good friend to Mike until he died. Now Mike works for Bill’s widow Jeannette, who he’s in love with, but he won’t make a move on her.
Mike’s a flawed character. He’s prone to drinking and sometimes goes a little too hard. He’s also a bit of a skirt-chaser even if he’s secretly holding a torch for Jeannette. For a while he was having an affair with the mayor’s wife, which plays into the main story when things escalate. None of this is portrayed as heroic, but rather indicative of a man whose career put him on the hard edge of life, and he lacked the means or ability to regulate himself on that edge.
This kind of thing happens among law enforcement officers, and is amplified if they’ve been injured in the line of duty. Mike’s been divorced at least twice, maybe more. Nevertheless he’s got a sense of nobility when it comes to protecting people, and that sense bubbles to the surface in Montana when people start turning up dead. Even though he’s not a detective any more, he looks into it and ultimately plays a key role in solving the problem.
After Mike you’ve got characters like Jeannette, her son Ray, Ray’s girlfriend Amelia, the eccentric paleontologist “Pick” Pickford, and Pick’s two graduate student assistants Laura and Tanya. Once again I’m going off the audiobook here, which was narrated by Michael Kramer, who has a voice like chloroform.
All of these characters are archetypes of their age and situation, executed well. Jeannette wants to keep the ranch going and she’s a no-nonsense boss, but you can also see why Mike is loyal to her. Ray is 17 and trying to figure out his future. He knows he wants to stay on the ranch that his family has managed for a century, but he’s in love with Amelia, and Amelia wants to Get Out Of Here, so they have puppy love tension.
The arrival of Pick and his team added a new dynamic as well. Since Laura and Tanya are the new Single Attractive Females in a place that doesn’t get many of those, they get plenty of attention, but Jeannette assigns Mike to escort Pick around the land on his hunt for fossils, both girls take a liking to the cowboy cop, and he eventually settles in with one of them. They’re smart about their business while also being approachable.
As for the villains, well, I don’t want to give too much away. They are all a little more run-of-the-mill: corrupt local politicians, a Russian mob associate, that sort of thing. Again, typical and even slightly predictable but done well and entertaining. This is all relevant in light of the next thing I want to talk about…
Other Reviews
When I hopped on Goodreads to add this book, I noticed the average rating was about 3.5 stars (which is low.) By then I had already read the first quarter and was enjoying it so I was curious about the low regard. The bulk of reviews were 3 stars, then 4, then 2. Usually that means the book ends poorly or doesn’t make sense.
But then I skimmed the reviews and realized the problem: THE DINOSAUR HUNTER came out in 2010, and The Feminists found it.
The longest and most detailed review had “cat lady” all over it. Basically this chick was mad that Mike wasn’t a woman and, even worse, was sexually attracted to women from time to time. She also hated that the ranchers acted like ranchers, feds acted like feds, and a couple of gay characters acted like gay characters. Whoops, sorry, already said feds.
My favorite complaint was that she thought Jeanette was the most interesting character (shocker!) but that she “disappeared for 75% of the book.” Which is bull crap, she was there for the whole thing, she just wasn’t the main character. Cherry on top, Cat Queen hated the fact that Mike made jokes about what he wanted to do versus what he ended up doing. Surprise! Men fantasize about things. The nerve.
A few of the other reviews echoed this sentiment so I didn’t worry about it. I finished the book and it was fine, this was just an example of readers being mad that a writer didn’t write it the way they thought he should. On top of that, Homer Hickam committed the cardinal 2010 sin of Not Being Sensitive Enough. Authors just call that good writing.
Content
There was plenty of sexual innuendo, though it wasn’t overt or tasteless. Mike had carnal relations at least once in the book in a fade-to-black situation. The action/violence of the climactic resolution had a few bloody deaths in it. There were 2 or 3 F-bombs and a smattering of lesser profanity throughout. It’d earn an R-rating on screen, but only just.
Recommend?
At the end of it all, yeah. I’d give it a high 3 or a low 4 stars. It was as good as most Longmire books and if you enjoyed those, or Jack Reacher, you’ll probably like THE DINOSAUR HUNTER. I thought it was pretty cool.
Get your copy here: