Relic

Title : Relic (1995, 474 pages)

Authors : Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Genre : Thriller; Cri-Fi

Rating : B

This Week I Read...
Something is slashing and gnashing people at the New York Museum of Natural History, and eating their brains. Is it human, animal, vegetable, monstrous, demonic, or alien? Whatever it is, Margo Green better find out quick cuz the museum wants to open a new exhibition in 4 days, and they aren't about to let a few grisly slayings get in their way.

What's To Like...
This is a page-turner. It starts off fast; there are no slow spots; and you can finish it in a couple of days. There are a few twists to keep you on your toes.

The heroes aren't Mary Sues. (not sure what a Mary Sue is? See here). Indeed, the mayor of New York gets cast in a favorable light. When's the last time a politician got that treatment in a novel?

And the book actually comes to a conclusion! You don't have to read 10 sequels for everything to wrap up. Take that, Robert Jordan.

What's Not To Like...
Despite the twists, the story is somewhat predictable. The bad guys get chomped; the good guys live. The ending, although climactic, is also a let-down. Brain-Chomper gets his just desserts, but you don't get many details about his ultimate demise, and the Feds apparently snatch up the body before the authors can give you much of a description of the corpse.

Finally, you have to believe that life, and new exhibits, go on as always, despite employees and visitors getting mutilated and disembrained.

Oh Cri-Fi! Thy name is Crichton!
The teaser on the cover says it all : "Alien meets Jurassic Park". But as Cri-Fi, Relic just doesn't quite measure up to JP. Oh, there are some computer-generated read-outs, but one doesn't get the feeling that the authors made a lot of technical effort to make this scientifically believable. (*)

Still, it is a decent book, so we'll give it a B, and see if we can find it's sequel, Reliquary, at the used-bookstore.

(*) : There's one glaring loose end to this story. A plane carrying most of the Amazonian expedition crashes early in the timeline, giving rise to the theory that a "Curse" is involved. But it becomes evident later on that Brain-Chomper wasn't on that plane. So why did it crash? Inquiring nit-pickers want to know.