Primeval

Primeval by David L. Golemon
St. Martin's Press, 2010
Hardcover, 368 pages

ISBN-13: 9780312580780

Event Group Series #5
http://eventgroupfiles.com/

Description:

Twenty thousand years ago, when early man made his way to North America, a tribe of prehistoric predators made the great trek as well. But these giant, deadly beasts seemingly became extinct…and humans lived to become the most violent creatures on Earth. Man’s brutal nature reached a boiling-point with the execution of Russia’s last czar and his entire family. But some believed that the czar’s children, Alexei and Anastasia, survived—and came to America with the treasury of the Romanov dynasty. That legend was born on July 17, 1918—and lives on to this day…
Almost a hundred years later, a battered journal—the only evidence left from the night of the Romanovs’ execution—turns up in a rare bookstore. Suddenly everyone’s trying to decipher the location of the Romanov treasure…and people are turning up dead along the way. Enter the Event Group, the most secret organization in U.S. history. Colonel Jack Collins is charged with finding out what really happened to Alexei and Anastasia. To get to the truth, he and his team will have to travel to the continent’s last deep wilderness where men have been vanishing for centuries— and come face to face with a mythical enemy from the dawn of time….

My Thoughts:

 

Primeval by David L. Golemon is the fifth book in his Event Group Series. There is a lot of back story to set up for this one. It begins in 20,000 BCE with people and creatures crossing the Bering Strait land bridge. Then jumps to Russia in 1918 where Tsar Nicholas has a plan in place to save some of his children, Anastasia and Alexei. Then the action is back east of Glacier Bay, Alaska. Next it's 1962 and Operation Solar Flare has begun. Finally, before the present day, it's 1968 and the novel follows a group of grad students following the Stikine River in Canada. 

 

Finally we are all up to date. In the present day someone is after a treasure connected with the Romanov dynasty. Jack's sister Lynn has been taken captive by the murderous thugs and it's time for the Event Group to step in, figure out what is really going on, and save the day. Even though this all sounds complicated, Golemon moves us pretty quickly through the back story to the present and then the action takes off.

 

Golemon has a large cast of characters in his books and you need to keep track of them as you are reading. Although Primeval could be a stand alone novel, it really helps if you already know many of the characters and their back stories.
The Event Series books are all fast, fun reads and perfect escapism.

 

highly recommended - especially if you are following the series

Quotes:

20,000 year BCE The grass was tall and abundant. The men watched as the herd of giants grazed on the sweet, salt-laden growth close to the edges of the warm seas. The waters lapped at the north and south shores of the narrow spit of land as it traveled eastward toward the new and unknown world where the sun was reborn each day.  opening

The giant creature stood over eleven feet tall. Its sheer weight alone was equal to eight of the humans it followed. The massive head had a broad brow, indicating the possibility of it carrying a brain near equal to that of a man’s. Its ability to walk upright made the animal quick of foot and steady on uneven terrain. The eyes held the spark of intelligence like no primate before it. The mouth was filled with teeth capable of chewing the harsh grasses, twigs, and bushes of the western continent—being flat and broad—as well as the large, sharp incisors of the meat eater.
The great beast was not usually a scavenger. In its natural element of forest or jungle, its kind excelled at providing for its females and its young. The art of camouflage came naturally to the hairy beast, blending in well no matter the terrain due to its thickness of fur and its ability to vary the crevasse and valleys of that fur, creating many broken lines and never a clean silhouette. pg. 5

1918, Russia: "Two of your children are guaranteed to survive tonight. That is how you must look at this....Tonight, above all else, you must be braver than your reputation."
Tsar Nicholas stopped suddenly... pg. 13

Annie, as I have come to call the girl, and I have spoken of the strangeness that surrounds us, and we both agree that a feeling of "knowing" has entered our thoughts, even our dreams. Knowing that whatever is out there, has been there for our collective memories to conjure in our waking lives. It's as if we have lived this journey a million years ago, a retained and collective memory of the danger in the night suffered by our ancestors. pg. 20

In the night came the nocturnal cry of They Who Follow, as they, too, waited for their lands to be visited by med from the outside world once more. The woods swallowed them, and they became one with the world that nurtured and protected them. pg. 28-29

The code name, Operation Solar Flare, would be lost forever, never to be mentioned in the annals of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, nor would the official histories of the U.S. navy and air force have anything placed into their archives telling the world that the United States was prepared to strike first against the Soviet Union. pg. 34

"Jack has done more for the stability of this nation than anyone in either houses, or the other branches of service.....The colonel is capable of getting out of any trouble. He thinks faster on the run than any man I have ever known. If he gets into trouble, he gets out of it. He doesn't fall into traps, Senator; he sees trouble coming and avoids it, which is how he keeps our field teams alive. He is the best at what he does." pg. 61