Bestiary
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A manuscript illuminated with fantastical creatures said to have roamed the Garden of Eden, the bestiary has been handed down throughout the centuries by one of the Arab world's most prominent families. Commissioned to restore it is the beautiful young art curator, Beth Cox.
But it is Beth's husband, Carter—a paleontologist making his own dire discoveries in Los Angeles's famed La Brea Tar Pits—who will be led by the bestiary into a living, breathing menagerie of wonders…and horrors.
Now myth and reality are about to collide. Carter will step back into a world before time…and unleash the creatures that haunt our dreams and nightmares.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest, Masello lets loose a stable of thriller stereotypes and drives them hastily, but not unskillfully, through a sprawling adventure story complete with shady foreigners, ancient codes and terrible monsters. Sinister Iraqi zillionaire Mohammad Al-Kalli hires Beth Cox, a medieval manuscript expert, to translate and restore his family's thousand-year-old bestiary, a medieval compendium of mythical animals painstakingly copied out by monks, replete with Da Vinci Code style hidden messages couched in dead languages. As it turns out, the creatures catalogued there a mix of Jurassic Park like prehistoric monsters are all too real and held in Al-Kalli's secret menagerie, which Beth's paleontologist husband has been hired, also by Al-Kalli, to study.. Masello throws into the mix an Elmore Leonardesque lowlife who's trying to blackmail Al-Kalli, a 24-style terrorist plot to immolate Los Angeles, Tom Clancyesque weapons specs ("the Beretta... featured a delayed locking block system, which provided a faster cycle time and exceptional accuracy"), an eerily sleepless infant la The Ring and a spooky original touch in the 9,000-year-old corpse dredged out of L.A.'s La Brea tar pits. Masello has a difficult time keeping together all these busy, dissonant subplots, but even if they don't mesh, each one is a well-wrought genre turn with colorful characters and punchy writing. The result is a diverting trip that may make you think twice before going back to the zoo.
