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The bonehunter
It is 1878 and Captain John Paley Dawkins, an English amateur palaeontologist, has staked his meagre inheritance upon an expedition to find a pterodactyl, set up by geologist Sheldon Prescott. Wary of Prescott's wilful daughter Lilian, they are soon forced together in a life-threatening quest.
370 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
8 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
Tom Holland
92 books3,743 followersTom Holland is an English historian and author. He has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, on many subjects from vampires to history.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Holland was born near Oxford and brought up in the village of Broadchalke near Salisbury, England. He obtained a double first in English and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge, and afterwards studied shortly for a PhD at Oxford, taking Lord Byron as his subject, before interrupting the post graduate studies and moving to London.
He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio 4. His novels, including Attis and Deliver Us From Evil, mostly have a supernatural and horror element as well as being set in the past. He is also the author of three highly praised works of history, Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium.
He is on the committee of the Society of Authors and the Classical Association.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Holland was born near Oxford and brought up in the village of Broadchalke near Salisbury, England. He obtained a double first in English and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge, and afterwards studied shortly for a PhD at Oxford, taking Lord Byron as his subject, before interrupting the post graduate studies and moving to London.
He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio 4. His novels, including Attis and Deliver Us From Evil, mostly have a supernatural and horror element as well as being set in the past. He is also the author of three highly praised works of history, Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium.
He is on the committee of the Society of Authors and the Classical Association.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
October 2, 2012
Years ago, I enjoyed reading The Vampyre. So when I saw another book by Tom Holland on a sale table, I grabbed it immediately. When I saw a few negative reviews of The Bone Hunter, I dismissed them - I shouldn't have. Now I know why this one was on the sale table. Disappointing.
July 30, 2011
Hmmm, finally finished this.. quite a drag. The back cover saying it was a "rollocking read" and lik Indiana Jones was very misleading. Wouldn't reccomend!
September 2, 2020
A slow read, very slow, just like the bones in the title, fossilised over thousands of years, and just as densely packed, but in words which slowly reveals various themes of injustice, corruption, ambition, cruelty, materialism and love, and incomplete at that.
December 23, 2021
A real B movie story which is a bit of a page turner,however the language used is rather pretentious and I feel it's trying to be something it is not. Worth trying though.
Read
June 25, 2022Interesting but a bit lengthy and wordy.
February 4, 2013
Originally published on my blog here in July 2003.
Dinosaur bones are something that people have been obsessed by since the earliest investigations into fossils, and the field was especially exciting in the second half of the nineteenth century for several reasons: the possibility of making sensational discoveries, and the thrill of being involved in the controversies about Darwinism and geological ideas of the ancient earth. Tom Holland has moved from historical horror novels to historical thriller with The Bone Hunter, a novel which features several men obsessed with finding dinosaurs in the American West in 1878.
Holland's story begins in a liner crossing the Atlantic, heiress Lilian Prescott returning home to New York after a trip to England culminating in her (Henry James style) engagement to a peer. She and her brother meet another passenger, a former British army captain named Dawkins, who is travelling to New York to meet their father. Captain Dawkins is, like their father, a dinosaur fanatic, but when he meets Sheldon Prescott it soon becomes clear that something is going on which is more serious than the admittedly fierce competition that exists between rival dinosaur hunters. This rivalry is stirred up when Prescott offers to see a great secret to the two best known Americans in the field; and this is is when people start dying.
The novel's first part is mainly set in New York, and is similar to another story set in the same time and place, E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. The second half, a quest into the still Wild West, is far more brutal, a picture of a sordid and vicious culture of violence without the romanticism later provided by Hollywood.
The Bonehunter is generally gripping (as might be expected from a writer who cut his teeth writing horror novels) and well written, an unusual thriller and proof that Holland can produce as good a novel without the supernatural elements of his earlier work. The one flaw it has is the treatment of the romance which grows up between Lilian Sheldon and Captain Hawkins; the descriptions of their inner feelings and of their conversations seem artificial and unconvincing.
For anyone who wants to read something different in the historical thriller line, however, The Bonehunter is a novel well worth looking out for.
Dinosaur bones are something that people have been obsessed by since the earliest investigations into fossils, and the field was especially exciting in the second half of the nineteenth century for several reasons: the possibility of making sensational discoveries, and the thrill of being involved in the controversies about Darwinism and geological ideas of the ancient earth. Tom Holland has moved from historical horror novels to historical thriller with The Bone Hunter, a novel which features several men obsessed with finding dinosaurs in the American West in 1878.
Holland's story begins in a liner crossing the Atlantic, heiress Lilian Prescott returning home to New York after a trip to England culminating in her (Henry James style) engagement to a peer. She and her brother meet another passenger, a former British army captain named Dawkins, who is travelling to New York to meet their father. Captain Dawkins is, like their father, a dinosaur fanatic, but when he meets Sheldon Prescott it soon becomes clear that something is going on which is more serious than the admittedly fierce competition that exists between rival dinosaur hunters. This rivalry is stirred up when Prescott offers to see a great secret to the two best known Americans in the field; and this is is when people start dying.
The novel's first part is mainly set in New York, and is similar to another story set in the same time and place, E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks. The second half, a quest into the still Wild West, is far more brutal, a picture of a sordid and vicious culture of violence without the romanticism later provided by Hollywood.
The Bonehunter is generally gripping (as might be expected from a writer who cut his teeth writing horror novels) and well written, an unusual thriller and proof that Holland can produce as good a novel without the supernatural elements of his earlier work. The one flaw it has is the treatment of the romance which grows up between Lilian Sheldon and Captain Hawkins; the descriptions of their inner feelings and of their conversations seem artificial and unconvincing.
For anyone who wants to read something different in the historical thriller line, however, The Bonehunter is a novel well worth looking out for.
August 4, 2012
There was enough suspense in the story to keep me reading, and the intrigue involved in 19th-century paleontology was interesting. However, the character development was haphazard. The reader is given background information about Captain Dawkins and Lilian Prescott that is meant to add depth to their characters and enhance the import of their decisions. In the end, I found all the connections that the author attempted to forge to be weak and not memorable. I understood what past experiences each character was supposed to be struggling with, but the way they dealt with those experiences did not seem natural to me. Basically--a story with lots of potential but with no characters that the reader can really empathize with.
June 22, 2013
I won't finish this book. Although a good story, it's painfully long.. I constantly have to re-read the last few pages every time I pick it up..
August 28, 2016
Contents outshone by the cover.
It should've been good but was too muddly.
Thank goodness it only cost 20p
If I'd paid full price I'd want a refund as it never once 'rollicked'
It should've been good but was too muddly.
Thank goodness it only cost 20p
If I'd paid full price I'd want a refund as it never once 'rollicked'
November 30, 2014
I didn't finish this book - don't recall why.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews