The Bone Hunter - Tom Holland

I think it’s fair to say that I’m a fan of Tom Holland’s books. I’ve read The Vampyre, Deliver Us From Evil and Sleeper In The Sands (haven’t read Attis or Sleeping With Panthers, but must try and get to them sometime) and found each book surpassing the achievements of the previous. Although thematically different, each has a supernatural theme, each one is based on historical characters or based in a particular period and the amount of research done has been evident but not intrusive - he never displays his facts and research just for the sake of it (like Dan Simmons seems to do increasingly), but to add mood and colour to his descriptions and characters. The progress in his books has been exciting to watch – the plots becoming more complex and unconventional, but always remaining gripping with extremely well-written dialogue and prose. So maybe it’s because I had such high expectations from a new Tom Holland novel that I found myself disappointed with The Bone Hunter.

Yet again, he has taken a completely new direction and the main parts of the novel take place in the late 1800s between New York and the recently tamed Wild West. The plot concerns the interests of a group of professors of palaeontology, fossil-hunters and the rumours surrounding an unusual find by one of them, Sheldon Prescott, of bones out West that seem to belong to different geological periods. This gets the other professors very excited in bidding for the information and resulting murders and intrigue ensue. An esoteric premise for a plot – about as conventional a mystery plot as The Name Of The Rose – and a not very exciting one, you might think. And you’d be right. It’s not a terribly exciting mystery that’s going to keep you gripped for 350 pages. And unlike previous novels, this time there is no overt supernatural element to the story. There are rumours and suggested evidence of a live pterodactyl surviving in this possible ‘Lost World’ where the fossils have been found – but it is obvious there is nothing ever going to come of this.

The main character of the novel, Captain Dawkins travels over from England at the request of Prescott. He is a fairly naïve character with a love for his study of fossils who finds himself thrown into a world of commerce, dealing, and intrigue in the quest for new discoveries. The Captain’s romantic attachment with Sheldon Prescott’s daughter (who is engaged to an English Lord) grows throughout the novel – and when Prescott is murdered – in what appears to be a Cheyenne style murder, his daughter goes West in search of his finds, the Captain must pursue her to protect her from the other parties interested in what these finds might mean. There is a whole other twist at the end when it becomes apparent that there are political motives involving the exploitation of the Indians, who by this stage are living mostly in reservations. That, in a nutshell, is the premise of the novel.

The part of the novel set in New York is well achieved. There is a strong depiction and a genuine feel of the city in its early stages of development. The parts describing the West are fairly dull. Long parts of the novel are accounts of travelling through this wilderness – and although there should be mounting tension as to the fate of Lily Prescott – a lady in her finest Parisian fashions in a wild environment with dangerous men – you never feel she is under any real threat and the Captain will get there eventually for the happy ending, which he does – but it is a long trek getting there.

I also felt that the characters never really came to life and were not properly dealt with in the story. There are just too many different parties interested in the discovery. A couple of professors, an ex-cavalry man and his gang of outlaws (or are they still part of the law? Wasn’t sure about this), Prescott’s daughter, the Captain, a couple of hired guns, a New York police detective (what he was doing out there solving a New York murder I don’t know. I think this was stretching it a bit) and various others. It becomes very hard to work out who all these groups are and why they are so interested in getting to the fossils.

So, a bit of a disappointing novel from Tom Holland. All the indications are there that he is as strong a writer as he always has been and he can weave a historical horror or mystery with good accuracy for the period and the people of the period – but I feel that this time the plot was overly complicated, not terribly exciting, and very slowly paced. It took far too long to get around to a resolution that wasn’t really worth getting to.