Dinosaur Four

Dinosaur Four (SF/Time Travel)

By Geoff Jones

ASIN #BOOKK1SU9W

Price $3.99

284 Pages

Rating 4-Stars

This review may contain spoilers. Ten people sitting in The Daily Edition Café suddenly find themselves thrown together in the prehistoric past. The café and the ten discover they have traveled back in time 67 million years, to the Cretaceous Period where dinosaurs and giant crocodiles 40-feet long are a dangerous threat. Finding part of the second-story room above still partially intact, they find three bodies and a dying woman; she explains that her team had been attempting invisibility, but somehow it backfired, causing a time warp. However, this sounded strange, as she went on to explain everything they needed to know about time travel, and that they had to find the missing football to take them back to the point of origin. Of course, she knew where they were going, and that the land would be covered with a lot of water. She also tells them there is a failsafe in the football; once they return to the present, they can use the failsafe to go back twenty minutes and stop the time travel incident. The bit about the invisibility must have been a bunch of hokum.

The woman dies, then five of the ten are killed by dinosaurs, a sixth is left in the past, and only four return, but the time paradox doesn’t exactly work as planned, and T-Rex goes with them. If it had worked as planned, supposedly none of the deaths would have occurred and the café would never have disappeared.

This was a fun story, exciting and dangerously grim, and I loved how well the author describes the land and scenery, as well as the dinosaurs. My only disappointment with the book is the heavy language throughout the narrative. As one character claims, “It’s only a word, man, it doesn’t mean anything.” Still, good writing does not need to be peppered with profanity to entertain. I highly recommend the book, but caution the reader if they might be offended by a lot of profanity.

Tom Johnson

Author of Pangaea: Eden’s Planet