n a world where dinosaurs not only survived to the present day but also live among humans in disguise, Vincent Rubio is a hard-bitten private eye working the mean streets of Los Angeles. He's also a raptor, living inside a human-being suit and navigating the complexities of his own saurian subculture even as he also inhabits the complications of the City of Angels.
A recovering herb addict saddled with the crippling debts left over from his years as a substance abuser, Rubio makes the mistake of accepting a simple job from dinosaur mob boss Frank Tallarico. Spending most of his advance before his quarry, Tallarico's rival Nelly Hagstrom, skips town, Rubio finds he is not allowed to quit and must instead continue work for the Florida branch of the Family. He also finds himself obliged to drag along his friend, Glenda Wetzel, a hadrosaur, whose presence is not appreciated by Tallarico's Florida associates.
Once in Florida, which is threatened by one of that state's frequent killer hurricanes, Rubio finds himself an unwilling participant in an increasingly bloody gang war. He also finds himself reunited with his childhood best friend, Jack Dugan, and Jack's sister Noreen, who was the great lost love of Rubio's life. Both of them have now joined Hagstrom's circle. Jack is suffering from a degenerative illness that has robbed him of the ability to walk. Noreen is no longer the sweet innocent Rubio remembers.
The body count rises, the storm moves toward shore, and Rubio begins to show the killers what a raptor's anger is really like ...
A novel with one dinosaur-sized flaw
There's no doubt about it. On a page-by-page, line-by-line level, the third in Eric Garcia's series of novels about dinosaur detective Vincent Rubio is a fine read, driven by the witty asides and vivid observations that have always turned the best detective stories into critiques of their respective milieus.
Vincent Rubio is a fun guy to listen to. Like the best fictional private eyes, he provides a stream of sardonic comments on everything he sees. As this novel takes him to Florida (the current choice setting for a popular subgenre of mysteries best described as "Psychos in the Sunshine State" and practiced to memorable effect by such popular mainstream mystery writers as Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Dave Barry, Les Standiford and others), Garcia even has plenty of choice material to work with: most notably his bemusement at the alarmist hurricane coverage that dominates the local news as a major storm system approaches the coast. Rubio, an L.A. boy, is understandably taken aback by all this, and his comments about the lunacy all around him are as clever as anything produced by the more celebrated practitioners of "Crime Amid the Coconuts" fiction.
As straight crime fiction, the book earns a B. The problem that costs it a full letter grade here, reducing it to a C unworthy of Garcia's very real skill, is the dinosaur element, which should provide Garcia's work its distinction and its sole relevance as a review subject for this forum. Garcia's dinosaurs dress like humans, act like humans and interact with humans in ways that render them, essentially, indistinguishable from humans. They've been living this way for all of human history, which means they developed the technology for such disguises long before humanity's ascendance would have rendered such an imposture an arguable necessity. The concept can't be taken seriously as speculative fiction, even within the limitations of a humorous novel; it's just a gimmick, and not a very good one.
If Garcia cannot find speculative plausibility in their survival among us, or satiric grist in their subculture or even opportunities for memorable action sequences in their physical capabilities ... if in fact their psychological differences from us are minor and their biological imperatives are completely hidden by the human costumes ... if the most Garcia can milk from this concept is the occasional name-drop of a celebrity like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts whose secret dinosaur heritage is supposed to provide sufficient amusement ... then the central conceit of this fiction is at best a lame joke, providing a thin layer of high-concept gloss over a fiction that is otherwise sufficiently well written to stand on its own. Removing the dinosaurs, taking this novel away from the realm of fantasy and placing it in the realm of private-eye fiction, where it belongs, would harm its impact not at all—a fact that renders the dinosaur element, at best, extraneous, and at worst, annoying.
It is never more so than in a flashback detailing the teenaged Rubio's doomed engagement to the beautiful Noreen. As written, it is a touching, humane and entirely believable love story, as good as any other chapter detailing a great heartbreak in a hardboiled protagonist's past. It works. It resonates. It would be nice if the fact that the boy and girl were also closeted dinosaurs added anything at all. Since it doesn't, it's hard not to wish, in that chapter and elsewhere, that it would all just go away.
