An ancient predator has been reborn in the caves beneath Crater Lake …and it’s hungry. DINOSAUR LAKE: Ex-cop Henry Shore has been Chief Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park for eight years and he likes his park and his life the way it’s been. Safe. Tranquil. Predictable. But he’s about to be tested in so many ways. First the earthquakes begin…people begin to go missing…then there’s some … mysterious water creature that’s taken up residence in the caves below Crater Lake and it’s not only growing in size, it’s aggressive and cunning…and very hungry. And it’s decided it likes human beings. To eat. And it can come up onto land. So Henry, with the help of his wife, Ann; a young paleontologist named Justin; and a band of brave men must not only protect his park and his people from the monster but somehow find where it lives and destroy it…before it can kill again. *** An EPIC EBOOK AWARDS 2014 Finalist in their Thriller category. And now there are four (soon to be five) sequels: Dinosaur Lake II: Dinosaurs Arising; Dinosaur Lake III: Infestation, Dinosaur Lake IV: Dinosaur Wars, Dinosaur Lake V: Survivors, and Dinosaur Lake VI: The Alien Connection .
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A creature feature that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
simplistic !
Started good and nicely paced but got really draggy from the middle on.
I enjoyed this book. It was every bit as good as Jurassic park. The characters were believable and the storyline was right and kept my interest.
just a good, easy read. no twisted, brain-clogging plots. would make a good beach read. easy to pick up and put down, only to pick up again later (you don’t get lost trying to figure out what was happening). good characters, makes you want to continue reading. looking forward to reading more by author
The book was a light, action story. I like science fiction, but this was totally unbelievable, but I liked the characters.
Kind of predictable, the science was way off base but it was good escapist entertainment.
Disregarding factual errors it is never the less an entertaining read.
What crap !!
It’s always fun to read about modern encounters with dinosaurs. Usually those fatal meetings occur in faraway places—an unknown island, the middle of the Amazon, caverns deep beneath the earth. What makes Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s tale so unique is that she chooses to introduce her dinosaur in a national park in the United States and therein lies both the strengths and weaknesses of the story.
The largest strength is the unusual setting—in the continental United States—where the dinosaur has a large number of human prey within easy reach. Unfortunately, this is really where the strengths end as well. No one carries their cell phones so they can’t take pictures of the growing evidence that a dinosaur is around—tracks, animal carcasses, and eventually the dinosaur itself. While everyone is naturally skeptical of the idea that a dinosaur could be alive today, not only are people disappearing but two very large boats are demolished by something and there is literally nothing known in the region that could damage them in that fashion. So even if you don’t jump to “dinosaur” as the solution, the idea that you should close the park and investigate isn’t far-fetched—but they don’t.
Then the dinosaur starts eating large number of people—again, no cameras—but this results only in a couple of FBI guys being sent. Why not send the National Guard? And the press finally comes (in time to get eaten) but really, they should have been swarming much earlier. Finally, our intrepid investigators manage to get a mini sub put in the lake, but still can’t get really serious infantry weapons (and people trained to use them). Again, if you’re arguing you need a sub armed with missiles to go after your monster, don’t you think that perhaps the navy might send expert teams to operate it? Or again, the National Guard might be mobilized to bring serious firepower to bear on the creature?
These weaknesses in just thinking out logically what kind of response the government would make to a creature killing lots of people really made it difficult to suspend disbelief in this novel. It’s still fun—tracking a dinosaur that keeps munching on the trackers is sort of the heart of a modern dinosaur story—but it isn’t the great novel I think this could have been.
A veritable hurricane of spelling and grammatical errors. Very clumsily written and surprisingly mysogynistic, which is such a shame because the story is fun and interesting.
Nothing serious here-just a guilty pleasure of a read. Think 50s monster movies and you’re in. I thought this would be classified as YA unless I missed it? On the fence about continuing the series-depends if the prices drop.
This is a creature story, Jurassic Park meets Godzilla.
PROS:
Henry’s first gun-n-run encounter with the beast was exciting. The cave fighting was exciting. The stomping, terrorizing scene was nail-biting. Fun stuff!
Grammar errors and typos that previous reviewers mentioned have been corrected in the version I read.
CONS:
I didn’t need the political discussion about minimum wage and government health care and detached politicians. Those passages were distracting and didn’t fit the plot.
I like a slow burn. I like dense, slow prose. This was neither. For a creature book, there isn’t much action. There’s a lot of chatter between characters without much tension. There’s a lot of ruminating inside Henry’s head. Much of the prose could be condensed.
OVERALL:
I love the premise of the book. The plot is great. It’s just too darn wordy to be a thriller. The later books in this series have better reviews. Ms. Griffith apparently honed her writing skills with each successive book. So yeah, even though I give this book only 3 stars, I wouldn’t mind reading more of the series.