I’m not familiar with James Rollins’ works. I’ll be honest, I’d not heard of him as an author prior to unwrapping Altar of Eden from its brown paper wrappings. It was the ‘blind date with a book’ I’d selected from a particularly quirky bookshop on a day trip to Canterbury, and clearly, the booksellers had lured me in.

The Premise

The premise (I think) is a female biologist, Dr Lorna Polk teaming up with Border Patrol (for some reason), to investigate a series of animal experiments, while a highly intelligent sabre-tooth tiger runs wild in the Louisiana swamps. Of course, the head of Border Patrol is Jack Menard, the older brother of Lorna’s teenage boyfriend, who died in an accident that they were both in. Of course, everyone in his family resents her for it. Of course, they’ll end up together in the end.

Review

I really wanted to enjoy this novel, because it seemed like it would be an easy read, but I struggled to get into it. My main gripe is that there’s a lot of telling, rather than showing: Rollins introduces Jack’s older brother, by him referring to Jack as ‘little brother’, then by telling a nothing back story of his character – he was in prison and hit a police officer. This isn’t a one off unfortunately.

The book is full of strange narrative choices, like the use of acronyms that the main character doesn’t understand, which then need to be explained to us as readers, or strange dialogue choices – ‘You said jaguars fed not just on turtles and fish, but also on caiman. The southern cousin of the American alligator.’ Why on Earth would anyone add the second sentence? Surely everyone, or at least the people the character is talking to (who might I remind you all said it in the first place) knows what a caiman is? And even though Rollins is leading up to changing the setting to ‘Uncle Joe’s Alligator Farm’, I’m sure his readers would have been able to work it out without being told.

The book’s saving grace is that the chapters are incredibly short, only a few pages each. If you’re into multiple POVs, the narrative perspective changes from Lorna in the first section, to jumping between characters. If you’re into complicated, inexplicable action, the latter half of the book is for you.

Altar of Eden had so much potential to be a really thrilling story, but in my opinion, it fell a little flat, relying on chaotic action movie tropes rather than crafting a meaningful story.

Rating

Oh well, onto the next book!