The Paleontologist
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
USA TODAY BESTSELLER
2024 ITW Thriller Award Winner
Esquire “Best Horror Books of 2023” Pick
A haunted paleontologist returns to the museum where his sister was abducted years earlier and is faced with a terrifying and murderous spirit in this chilling novel.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Well-rendered characters and an original premise once again distinguish Dumas's unnerving second thriller (after 2022's A History of Fear). When Simon Nealy was 10 years old, he and his six-year-old half sister, Morgan Jenks, visited the Hawthorne Museum of Natural History in Wrexham, Pa., by themselves. Their happy excursion turned into a nightmare when Morgan vanished from the insect hall while Simon checked out the dinosaur collection. Morgan was never found, and their drug-addicted mother's subsequent grief and negligence led to Simon being put in the care of an aunt in Chicago. Over the ensuing decades, he became a successful paleontologist, rising to the position of associate curator of dinosaurs at Chicago's Field Museum. After his aunt dies, Simon accepts the position of director of paleontology at the Hawthorne and returns to Wrexham in an attempt to solve Morgan's disappearance. Once there, he both revives old horrors and uncovers new ones, as he comes to fear the Hawthorne may be haunted by sinister supernatural forces. Dumas fully realizes his characters (even Simon's mother gets sympathy for her vices ), making it easier to swallow the plotline's more outré elements. Fans of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's Relic will relish this suspenseful and moving page-turner.
