The Lazarus Taxa by Lindsey Kinsella

Overall Rating: *** (3 stars)

The Lazarus Taxa is a readable and entertaining, but rather predictable, story of time travel and dinosaurs.

Sidney “Sid” Starley is a daredevil, constantly in search of experiences that no one else has ever had, the riskier and more dangerous the better. When we first meet him, he is climbing a Himalayan peak that no human has ever conquered before – partly because the local government has forbidden mountaineers from making the attempt.

After his expedition fails, Sid is bailed out of prison and recruited by the British billionaire Richard Mansa for a new venture. Mansa’s firm has developed the world’s first working time machine. He now plans to prove the new technology with an expedition back to the late Cretaceous era, the time of the dinosaurs.

Sid jumps at the opportunity, and soon finds himself with three teammates in central North America, sixty-eight million years into the past. After six months on station, the time machine will have recharged sufficiently to bring them home to the present. The plan is for them to survey the countryside, examining the flora and fauna, gathering photos and scientific data. They are well-armed, they have plenty of supplies, and their transit vehicle is something of a fortress. They have every confidence that they will be able to survive their sojourn in the Cretaceous. At least at first.

Unfortunately, it soon becomes obvious that Mansa has misled Sid and his colleagues in several respects. They find evidence that their expedition was not the first to venture into the distant past . . . and there may be other humans already there, with an agenda of their own. It soon becomes a race to see if they can solve a few mysteries and still survive the experience.

As far as basic mechanics are concerned, The Lazarus Taxa is at least workmanlike. The copy-editing was a little rough in spots. Characters and plot are unfortunately rather flat and predictable – the story reads like a treatment for a film script, with all the anticipated beats and plot twists. I saw the solution to the mystery well in advance, with the remaining suspense coming almost entirely from wondering which of the characters was going to reach the denouement.

It’s clear that Mr. Kinsella is well-versed in paleontology, and it’s in the passages where he describes a long-ago and alien Earth that the book relaxes enough to shine. He makes a move which I found rather odd at first: every few chapters he breaks up the dramatic action with a short essay in authorial voice, giving the reader some paleontological detail. The technique grew on me after a few iterations. Many inexperienced genre novelists make the mistake of larding their narrative with exposition-dumping and telling-not-showing passages, pulling the reader out of the story every time they succumb to the temptation to show off all their research. By loading most of that into these well-marked interstitial chapters, Mr. Kinsella avoids crippling his dramatic narrative with it. The result reads a little like a “docu-drama,” and it works well once the reader is used to it.

Readers should be aware that the story ends up rather violent and gory in places. It’s a story about dinosaurs meeting humans – of course there will be some scary beats in the plot!

I found The Lazarus Taxa readable and entertaining. Recommended if you’re interested in stories about dinosaurs, or time travel into Earth’s distant past, with a dash of corporate intrigue.