Book Review: Return to the Lost World by Greig Beck (#Primordia 2)

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. 

My Review: 
This blurb and review contain spoilers from book one in the series.

Emma survived the deadly trip to the Lost World, barely escaping before the plateau vanished for another ten years, taking Ben with it. She knows she has ten years to prepare another expedition and persuade Ben's former military buddies to help her launch a rescue mission to bring him home. As she connects with old contacts and recruits new people, she fears that Ben may already be dead and feels guilty that despite her warnings, nobody on her new team believes what they are about to witness with their own eyes. She also has to deal with the journalist who has forced her way on to the expedition, trying to prove that Emma was the one who killed Ben and is just staging the rescue as a cover up. 

Ben is still alive. He has had to use his military skills and what he learned from his first few days on the plateau to survive, moving around a whole new dinosaur land below it. He has spent time by the sea and had encounters with new deadly creatures, counting the days until the comet arrives again. As the final few days come, Ben finds that life becomes even more dangerous as he makes his way back, and there is the added fear that if Emma doesn't come for him, he will be living with the dinosaurs forever-or at least until they kill him.

There are new characters on the expedition. Ben's former military friends have agreed to help Emma so we are introduced to Drake, Fergus, Ajax and Brocke. There is the nasty journalist Camilla and her photographer Juan, who do prove their worth by getting rid of some of the red tape that is crippling Emma as the expedition prepares to leave. She has also persuaded paleontologist brother and sister Andy and Helen as experts to guide them. The group decide to follow the secret river to the plateau on a balloon to save time, with the plan of dropping down onto the plateau as soon as it appears but of course things start to go wrong when Emma hasn't taken into account the flying menace around her that takes an interests in the balloon and the occupents of it, sending them crashlanding into the lake.  

There again are lots of dinosaurs to enjoy on the trip. We have the brilliant pterosaurs, who were always favourites of mine as a kid and the scary mososaur in the lake that you really want to stay the heck away from! There are lots of big deadly titanoboas as well which give a lot of interesting and tense action scenes, and the big deadly carnivore dinosaurs that we met in the first book. As much as I love dinosaurs, I certainly wouldn't want to be on this particular adventure. There is just so much danger around every corner in this book and it does get into the story quicker than the first book. While we see Emma prepare for the trip, we switch back to see how Ben is coping with the dinosaurs and finding out some of what he has had to deal with as he waited for the comet to return.

This was a good sequel with plenty of creatures to scare the reader and a greater focus on the snakes than we saw in the first book. I enjoyed the typical tension, action and danger that is normal for a creature feature book.  

Read February 2019.
4 stars.