PRIMORDIAL

PRIMORDIAL

A body in the badlands. A billionaire with a secret. And something in the rock that shouldn't be alive.

When forensic paleontologist Dr. Mara Cole is pulled from sleep by a three a.m. phone call, she learns that her former partner — an undercover agent eleven months deep into a fossil trafficking operation — has been found dead in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. His field notebooks are gone. His laptop is gone. And the dig site behind him tells a story of industrial-scale excavation unlike anything she has ever seen.

What Ron Tesh died for turns out to be the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered. But when the evidence trail leads Mara and FBI Counter-Intelligence agent Dexter Hargrove from a Park Avenue black-market auction to the remote Alaskan archipelago, the fossil is only the beginning.

Somewhere on an unmapped island, a disgraced tech billionaire has built a laboratory. Inside it, a team of scientists — some willing, some not — have spent three years working at the bleeding edge of ancestral genome reconstruction, using CRISPR technology to walk the evolutionary clock backwards. They started with cassowaries. They did not end with cassowaries.

PRIMORDIAL is a propulsive, meticulously researched thriller grounded in real science — the confirmed fossil black market, Jack Horner's "chickenosaurus" project, Mary Schweitzer's discovery of preserved soft tissue in dinosaur bone, and the extraordinary frontier of genetic ancestral reconstruction. It asks a question that Jurassic Park never fully confronted: what happens when the creature you've rebuilt isn't just dangerous — but intelligent?

A murder investigation becomes a race against a deadline. A scientist trapped on an island runs out of ways to stay invisible. And in the lower levels of a facility the world doesn't know exists, something with amber eyes and sixty-six million years of evolutionary memory is waiting to find out what the walls are made of.

For readers of Michael Crichton, Daniel Silva, and Richard Preston. Science that is real. Stakes that are absolute. A thriller that doesn't let you breathe.