Title: The Paleontologist

Author: Luke Dumas

Publisher: Atria Books 2023

Genre: Thriller

Pages: 356

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Unread Shelf Project; 52 Book Club - Grieving Character

Curator of paleontology Dr. Simon Nealy never expected to return to his Pennsylvania hometown, let alone the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History. He was just a boy when his six-year-old sister, Morgan, was abducted from the museum under his watch, and the guilt has haunted Simon ever since. After a recent breakup and the death of the aunt who raised him, Simon feels drawn back to the place where Morgan vanished, in search of the bones they never found.

But from the moment he arrives, things aren’t what he expected. The Hawthorne is a crumbling ruin, still closed amid the ongoing pandemic, and plummeting toward financial catastrophe. Worse, Simon begins seeing and hearing things he can’t explain. Strange animal sounds. Bloody footprints that no living creature could have left. A prehistoric killer looming in the shadows of the museum. Terrified he’s losing his grasp on reality, Simon turns to the handwritten research diaries of his predecessor and uncovers a blood-soaked mystery 150 million years in the making that could be the answer to everything.

A complete impulse buy around Christmastime. I thought it might be a fun thriller with a focus on dinosaurs. And it mostly is. We get a potentially unreliable narrator who decides that his next step in life is to revisit a place that holds the beginning of his trauma. Seems like a bad idea to me, but Simon does it. From there, the paranormal elements start to occur and we are left to piece out the mystery of just what is happening the museum. My biggest complaints are focused on the side characters. The various employees of the museum are pretty terrible. The board members are extra terrible. Every time I picked up the book, I really did it pretty begrudgingly. By the end of the book I really as pretty tired of every one and the story. A bit of a disappointment, but it was fine.

Next up on the TBR pile: