Dragon Teeth is more than just a throwback to Michael Crichton’s earlier writing, it is his earlier writing. A complete manuscript found among Crichton’s copious notes, it is polished, compelling, and without a doubt meets the standards of the only writer to have a number one book, movie, and tv show in the same year. Much closer to The Great Train Robbery than Jurassic Park, Dragon Teeth is a fast-paced historical fiction thriller set in the Wild West. A bored student, William Johnson, gets caught between famed feuding paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edwin Drinker Cope. Abandoned in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Johnson has to find his way in a world of crime and vice… and survive when he stumbles upon a discovery of historic proportions.
More than fifteen years ago, Philip Pullman took us through worlds both like and unlike our own in His Dark Materials trilogy. In The Book of Dust he delves further into how Lyra came to live in Oxford, embarking on a new trilogy that begins in Lyra’s past, continues in Lyra’s future, and ends somewhere yet to be revealed. Set both before and after His Dark Materials, it is neither prequel nor sequel, but a work that Pullman calls “an equel”, placed beside his earlier works. La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of The Book of Dust, delves into the nature of Dust, the mystical substance that permeates the universe all around us, once again exploring daemons, alethiometers, and the Magisterium. When inquisitive Malcolm finds a secret message about a dangerous substance called Dust, it sets off a whirlwind adventure that culminates in a daring escape from both Magisterium agents and a flood of Biblical proportions with nothing but his wits, his daemon, his canoe, and a baby named Lyra.
When editor Susan Ryeland receives a new manuscript from one of her best-selling mystery authors, Alan Conway, she has no reason to suspect that it won’t be like his other works. The more she reads, however, the more she begins to think that there is meaning hidden in the book. But the manuscript isn’t finished and Conway is dead. Could the book’s hidden meaning give Susan a clue about Conway’s death?
Magpie Murders starts before you expect it to, doesn’t end when it seems like it is about to, and delights throughout. Mystery fans get the treat of two puzzling deaths and the split structure that Horrowitz employs gives a delayed gratification that is simultaneously infuriating and delightful. Starting as a classic detective novel, readers of Magpie Murders ultimately get to puzzle along with Susan, the editor-turned-detective on the trail of the cause of Conway’s death and maybe even the manuscript’s conclusion as well.