The Himalayan Codex: An R.J. MacCready Novel

Schutt and Finch provide a textbook example of how to make the fantastic easy to buy into with their superior second Crichton-esque thriller featuring field zoologist R.J. MacCready (after 2016’s Hell’s Gate). In 1946, Maj. Pat Hendry visits Mac at his offices in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Natural History and shows him jawbones from a dwarf mammoth that suggest the creature had two trunks. Hendry reveals that the bones came from a remote part of Tibet known as the Labyrinth, which may also be the site of an even more amazing discovery—an incomplete codex believed to have been written by Pliny the Elder, which describes the ancient Roman naturalist’s encounter with something in the Labyrinth that could be “the key to shaping life itself.” Mac agrees to travel to the Himalayas to find and recover whatever that something is. Schutt and Finch enhance their suspenseful plot with descriptions of unusual but convincing life forms. An extended author’s note at the end explains that such speculation is grounded in science. [em]Agent: Gillian MacKenzie, Gillian MacKenzie Agency. (June) [/em]