The Naturalist

Andrew Mayne's latest novel kept me on the edge of my seat all the way thru to the blood-soaked conclusion.

Dr. Theo Cray is a suspect in the death of a former student until local law enforcement decides that a bear is responsible. Theo doesn't agree and uses his computational biology expertise to uncover a terrifying pattern suggesting that a brutal serial killer is at work in the Montana backcountry. With each new lead that his computer model predicts, Theo gets closer to the truth, while the killer studies his pursuer.

I got a kick out of Theo's tenacious efforts to track a killer while explaining the science to readers and getting the crap beat out of him several times. Where this novel falls short is in the underdeveloped secondary characters. This story is the “Theo show” and there isn't much room for anyone else. Is that what a typical scientist's life is really like? I'm not sure, but I'd be interested in reading more of Theo's exploits, particularly if he also gets a life with some fleshed out companions.

My first book of 2021. It started great. Interesting subject, fun to follow protagonist.. About halfway through the book, I thought I'll give it five stars. Maybe 60%. Then it started to stumble. It lost its believability as the protagonist pushed his luck more and more. In the end it was a 3.5⭐ for me which I rounded to 3⭐

Alas, another one bites the dust.

I strongly dislike DNFing this at the low percentage I did (6%, 23 pages in) but the hook just wasn't there. The opening was fantastic (placed us right in the middle of a murder) but everything afterward was exposition - I don't quite care about the unique area of study the main character is working with, except for how it directly relates to the story. After I turned a new chapter and found we were being placed with more exposition (something about the natural order of nature, or how the systems work, I don't quite recall) I closed the book and moved on.

The premise was pretty cool - a computational biologist uses his unique skillset to create an algorithm that helps him find the likely location of bodies from missing people files. The writing was fair and the supporting characters are written pretty well. The problem is that the main character, who otherwise almost comes across as Asperger's-level analytical, makes really counter-character decisions repeatedly through the story. He goes forth and does stuff that just don't make any sense in light of everything he describes himself to be. And he just keeps doing it to an absurd degree. Even his self-talk is “why am I doing this?” “I shouldn't be doing this.” “Nobody will believe me or understand why I'm doing this.”

So rating the book was hard. I liked the premise. I wish there were more books with a biology professor as the main character (please suggest any if you know of others). I liked the AI algorithm part of it. I liked the supporting cast and the writing of those characters. The book gets 5 stars on all of that. But the main character stuff mentioned above is a 2-star kind of deal. And the main character is key to a fiction book, right?