#1173: Minor Felonies – Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020) by Stuart Gibbs

It was after finishing Stuart Gibbs’ Moon Base Alpha trilogy that I turned my eye upon his FunJungle novels, wondering if he brought the same sense of open-handed clewing and enjoyable detection to his other books. And, as it happened, he had just published sixth FunJungle title Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020), in which a Tyrannosaurus skull disappears from muddy surrounds with no footprints to account for its removal. Colour me intrigued…

It’s taken five other books and four years of reading to get here, then — I do so like to do things chronologically, and there was one impossible crime to capture my interest along the way (well, one and a half…) — but finally we arrive at the book which got me interested in reading this excellent series. And, as perhaps is to be expected after such a long wait, I have to say that I found this entry a little disappointing, even if it still does enough of the strong work that makes FunJungle such a reliably entertaining place to visit.

The skull is found on the ranch of the Bonotto family, whose youngest son Sage is at school with protagonist-sleuth Teddy Fitzroy. Far from opening with the discovery and building up to the disappearance, Gibbs maintains the narrative propulsion which makes his books so enjoyable by only introducing the skull after its vanishment: such discoveries are rare, after all, and are generally kept as quiet as possible precisely because there’s the risk of others trying to muscle in and steal such a rare a valuable fossil. So we’re brought into events only after the excavation, led by the respected Dr. Ellen Chen from the University of Texas, is disrupted by the partially-uncovered skull being apparently stolen…the only difficulties being first the muddy nature of the site which renders the lack of footprints and other marks all but impossible…

Sage mustered the best response anyone could come up with. “Maybe the rain washed all the footprints away.”

[Sheriff] Esquivel…walked over to the gouge in the bluff where the skull had been. It was only twelve feet from the river’s edge and the mud was deep there. His boots sank two inches down into it. Then he lifted one foot out. It made a thick sucking noise and left a large, foot-shaped divot. “That’s not just a footprint,” Esquivel said. “That’s a crater. And a person lugging something that weighed five hundred pounds would sink down even farther. I know last night’s storm was big, but it wasn’t a hurricane. If eight to ten people were here, there’d be some evidence of it.”

…and second the small matter of the site being several miles from the nearest road, along which any sort of transportation would have to be brought to carry away such a weighty object. How, then, could the removal have been effected?

One of those two issues — I’ll not say which one — is dealt with very well indeed, intelligently using the environment, the setup, the people involved, and just about every other aspect of the situation Gibbs has created to cleverly obfuscate and yet, through clever repetition of a key idea, open-handedly supply the answer while the reader sails right past it. The other is dealt with…less well, with an explanation that somewhat takes the shine off the cleverness displayed elsewhere, more or less boiling down to ‘Oh, that thing we said they couldn’t do? Yeah, nah, they just did it’ and hoping you don’t want to ask any, like, questions.

Interestingly, though, especially as it provides the title and is by far the more eye-catching of the strands herein, the vanishing of the skull is arguably the B-plot of this entry, with a greater focus on the recently-opened Snakes Alive, a tourist attraction marketing itself as a cheaper alternative to FunJungle that appears to have some dodgy practices going on behind the scenes. Gibbs’ writing has always been infused with a sense of social responsibility towards animals, and he throws here light upon another widespread problem in the modern age, namely that so many people want to own exotic animals…which often have access restricted to them for very good reasons.

“The illegal pet trade is a lot bigger than most people realize. After drug smuggling, it’s the biggest criminal business on earth. A person in a third world country can sometimes make more money poaching a Mangshan viper or a parrot or a pangolin than they can make in an entire year of honest work.”

“Did you just say a pangolin?” Summer asked. “Like, a scaled anteater?”

Tommy said, “They’re the most trafficked mammals in the world. We estimate that a hundred thousand might be getting poached every year. Most of them are being killed for their hides, but the pet traders are taking some too. Heck, the pet traders are taking everything: monkeys, lemurs, hedgehogs, tigers. And they’ll do almost anything to sneak them into the country. About a year ago, some idiot on a passenger plane got caught with Asian cats stuffed in his backpack and pygmy monkeys in his underwear. Unfortunately, for every idiot who gets caught, there’s at least a hundred smarter people who don’t. Most of these animals aren’t being smuggled in airplane luggage. They’re being hidden in shipping containers and things like that.”

Pleasingly, too, Gibbs engages with this side of things intelligently, using the dunderheaded Barksdale twins as foils for the perils of such ownership, but also acknowledging that any short-term gain from arresting the traders on the ground is largely meaningless because of the scale of the operation internationally. This is something I particularly enjoy in these books, the way Gibbs engages readers with the scope of a problem while also opening the door on the difficulties of such things as international jurisdiction and the ability criminal networks have to simply spring up hydra-like elsewhere if all you do is cut an outlet off. It can’t be easy to balance such a negative message with meaningful plot actions, and yet he seems to manage it in every book.

The balance might sound a little off from the above, but Gibbs walks the line well, sprinkling little observations throughout that bring a reader’s expectations into the light — “[t]he act of excavating dinosaur bones didn’t seem to have changed much since it had first been practiced in the 1860s.” — and providing another clever reversal in the closing stages that tie the various threads together well. Yes, it’s a little unlikely this time, but why read escapist fiction if you’re not willing to allow a little escapism?

So, while by no means a failure — it’s actually perhaps the most complex balancing act in the series so far — Tyrannosaurus Wrecks falls perhaps a little short of the heights of this superb series by facing reality down and then becoming altogether a little too glossed-over in answering perhaps its most pertinent question. Gibbs is to be applauded, however, for working in murky business dealings and corporate greed so well, and for explaining away his big twist so adroitly, and the FunJungle series will long remain for me a touchstone of what juvenile mysteries do so well when they are successful, and maybe that should be enough. With two more books currently in print, it will be a sad day when there’s no more Teddy Fitzroy to brighten my reading horizon.

Stuart Gibbs’ mysteries for younger readers:

FunJungle