Anonymous Rex: A Detective Story
by Eric Garcia

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Book Reviews of Anonymous Rex: A Detective Story

Book Review: Exhilaratingly different!
Summary: 5 Stars

When I first picked up ANONYMOUS REX, it sounded a bit daffy to me - dinosaurs weren't extinct and lived among us. Granted, you have to get used to the idea that the main character in the book, Vincent Rubio, is a Velociraptor in disguise - a human "guise" as dinos call it. It seems that over decades, dinosaurs became smaller and decided to get along with humans, instead of wiping us out. How nice of them. Along the way, they figured out how to make guises so a human couldn't tell the difference. But dinosaurs can; each one has a distinct odor that identifies them - this is how dinos tell who's human and who's not. They even faked dinosaur fossils to fool humans into thinking they'd indeed become extinct a long time ago.

Back to Vincent - he's a private detective who's dealing with his partner's "accidental" death. This happened while they were working on a big case involving the murder of a dino who'd committed a big no-no: sexual relations with a human. Because of Vincent's insistence it wasn't an accident, he blew it big-time, lost his contract with the PI firm he worked for, got kicked off the Council (the dinosaur consortium that keeps everyone in line) and lost himself in a daze of herbs, especially basil - herbs make dinosaurs high and each dino has their favorite "drug."

Vincent suddenly gets a freelance job to investigate a Los Angeles nightclub fire. The job comes from the same PI firm that blacklisted him. He needs the dough, so he takes the job and soon finds there's a connection between the fire and the case he and his partner worked on.

Vincent hops a plane to New York to continue the investigation, much to the chagrin of many dinos, including the wife of the murdered dino from his old case, the girlfriend, the coroner and an encounter with a particularly nasty dino sans a human guise.

If I say anymore, it'll give the plot away.

Eric Garcia is a master at getting the reader involved to the point of distraction. I know - my spouse was about ready to leave me because I couldn't put the book down. You get used to the contraptions that hold the human guise in place and you wonder how a Brontosaur could get so small to look like a human. ANONYMOUS REX is rollicking good fun and a fantastic detective story. I can't wait for the next book, CASUAL REX. But I have just one question for the author: Why is it called ANONYMOUS REX when the main character is a raptor?

Summary of Anonymous Rex: A Detective Story

In Eric Garcia's wild but winning first mystery, dinosaurs never did get wiped out--they evolved secretly and now make up about 5 percent of the world's population. There are dinosaur doctors, lawyers, even detectives like Rubio--although he's hit a low point in his own career because of the suspicious death of his beloved partner. Now the distraught Vincent sucks up so much basil that he can't do his job. But when a human who knows the dinosaurs' secret is killed during an arson fire at a popular dino disco called the Evolution Club, Rubio's luck begins to change. He starts to snoop, following the trail of a lovely human female to the office of Dr. Emil Vallardo, where bizarre experiments are being done on interspecies breeding between humans and dinosaurs. It's all great comic book fun, full of nice little inside jokes, served up deadpan and with full respect for the private eye genre it enlivens. --Dick Adler

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