World Reads #3 Venezuela

On the 5th of each month Stephanie Jane over at http://stephjb.blogspot.com/ hosts World Reads! The idea is to read one or more books set in a certain country, then share what you read, with the aim of encouraging and promoting global literature. I've decided to join in each month as an excuse to look at difference locations within my favourite genres and share new books with you.

This week I'm off to find dinosaurs in Venezuela. I read the first two books in the series and enjoyed them in February and hope to read the third at some point soon.

Ben Cartwright, former soldier, home to mourn the loss of his father stumbles upon cryptic letters from the past between the author, Arthur Conan Doyle and his great, great grandfather who vanished while exploring the Amazon jungle in 1908.

Amazingly, these letters lead Ben to believe that his ancestor’s expedition was the basis for Doyle’s fantastical tale of a lost world inhabited by long extinct creatures. As Ben digs some more he finds clues to the whereabouts of a lost notebook that might contain a map to a place that is home to creatures that would rewrite everything known about history, biology and evolution.

But other parties now know about the notebook, and will do anything to obtain it. For Ben and his friends, it becomes a race against time and against ruthless rivals.

In the remotest corners of Venezuela, along winding river trails known only to lost tribes, and through near impenetrable jungle, Ben and his novice team find a forbidden place more terrifying and dangerous than anything they could ever have imagined.

It was true – it was all true – and we were never meant to be there.

In December 2018, Ben Cartwright, former Special Forces soldier, and a team of naive explorers, followed the clues left by his ancestor to a hidden plateau in the middle of the Amazon jungle. It was said that once every 10 years, a secret pathway was revealed to a world long since gone.

They went, and what they found was a place of wonders and of horrors. Only Ben and his childhood love, Emma, survived. But when the doorway to the hidden world closed, Ben was trapped on the wrong side.

Now, Emma has waited 10 long years for the doorway to open again. This time she’d be ready. This time she had everything she needed to go back to that hellish place and survive. All she needed was for Ben to be alive when she got there.

No one really noticed when things started to change. Some animals vanished. Some new ones appeared. Then some things appeared that were monstrous. No one seemed to notice except Ben Cartwright and the other survivors of the hidden plateau in the depths of the Amazon Jungle. Only they were aware of the growing threat to the human race.

While Andy Martin lived out his dreams by venturing north to witness the birth of the American continent and navigate a prehistoric inland sea of the Late Cretaceous, whatever he was doing was rippling forward to change our world. Every day brought new threats in the form of creatures that should have long been extinct, or newly evolved monstrosities that were from mankind’s worst nightmares.

The comet, Primordia, was returning and time was up. They had to go back and find Andy and stop him before mankind vanished from the face of the Earth.