Hominid starts with a childhood camping trip gone wrong. Years later, a young conservationist still ponders the death of her father, and the strange creature at the centre of the tragedy. Ready to risk her distinguished career in its pursuit, she will stop at nothing to prove the existence of America's best known monster: Bigfoot. But her work and research needs money, and there are those all too willing to provide it, if she can provide them with a body. What she seeks has incredible strength,

Hominid starts with a childhood camping trip gone wrong. Years later, a young conservationist still ponders the death of her father, and the strange creature at the centre of the tragedy. Ready to risk her distinguished career in its pursuit, she will stop at nothing to prove the existence of America's best known monster: Bigfoot. But her work and research needs money, and there are those all too willing to provide it, if she can provide them with a body. What she seeks has incredible strength, unprecedented intelligence, and a natural ability to go undetected. The potential it has for military, medical and other interests are all too obvious.



The main character at the centre of Hominid is a strong female lead. I immediately felt her plight and identified with her easily enough. I understood how she thought and I found her very realistic, up to a point at least. Most of the characters are easy enough to get along with, but I have to say I found them a little two dimensional at times.



The first third of the book escalates quickly, and there is a fine sense of threat that builds and has you ripping through the pages. These scenes are described very well, and I definitely enjoyed the first part of the book the most.



Unfortunately, the ominous cover and the build of threat are all for nothing though. It diverged very quickly from being a monster story to one of friendly forest giants, complete with magical empathic abilities et al. This really seemed at odds to what had been suggested and I was incredibly disappointed that the book went down this avenue. Given the considerable amount of research out there, this turned what could have been a brilliant monster story into a farce.



I also had issue with the strong female lead needing a burly Native American to make her life complete. And there were a whole host of strange issues discussed and raised. It seemed to go considerably off track to say the least. I suppose to a certain extent it's simply because I wanted my hominid to be hairy and horrible. In any case, my search for a scary sasquatch continues!