Reviews for Los Gatos of the CIA: Hunt for Fred-X

The average rating for Los Gatos of the CIA: Hunt for Fred-X based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-21 00:00:00 Cameron Hearne Even making allowances for the generally poor quality of writing in the "dinosaurs are in our midst!" genre, this is a very silly book. In fact, if it weren't so silly, one might be tempted to call it slightly racist - or maybe more than slightly. The dinosaur in this case is a flightless bird, Titanis walleri, extinct in the early Pleistocene, carnivorous, fast, and big (fossils indicate a height of about 8 feet). Smith makes his Titanis 10-feet tall, gives them human-like forelimbs, and endows them with human thought and the capacity for a spoken (or, at least, sung) language. They have names like Walks Backward, The Scarlet, Egg Mother, and Egg Father, and they "think" things like, "Walks Backward knew what should be done. The Scarlet should be hunted down, at night, and killed. It was the only way, but it was not his place to decide such. The Egg Father and Egg Mother only could decide an act of that magnitude." And then he SIGHS, because Smith's creatures can do that, too. OK, fine, so it's fiction. Jaws wasn't all that realistic either. But there's stretching scientific truth and then there's just making stuff up. Though the only fossil evidence of T. walleri in Florida was found way up north in the state, Smith's Titanis has survived in the Everglades. Also in the Everglades, according to Smith, are outcroppings of sandstone (no, really, there aren't) and oolitic limestone (ditto, though oolite can be found in the lower Keys and some of the barrier islands off Miami). He imagines the Everglades as some sort of vast, thick forest of enormous trees in which large groups of 10-foot-tall animals could live undetected for millennia, which more than suggests Smith has never actually been to the Everglades. If he had, he'd have observed a vast area of grassy swamp in which anything over a couple of feet tall would have a hard time hiding. With his Titanis, noble savages who are only trying to protect their culture and pose a threat to humans solely when they are threatened, Smith seems to be working out an extended metaphor about Native Americans and white interlopers. And yet there's something disturbing about using enormous, human-esque birds, which do everything but say "Ugh!" and try to sell you blankets, as stand-ins for human beings. Meanwhile, the *actual* Native Americans in the cast are largely a feckless and inarticulate collection of types and stock characters. At a technical level, the writing is amateurish and frequently ungrammatical, but most of the time it's just clumsy, labored, and artless. Take these sentences: "Trees and bush pressed in all around, which was a good thing. Because all of that vegetation would muffle the sounds of gunfire, of which they were all certain there would be" (250), or this one, in which a "terror bird" attacks a man who has taken refuge in a tree: "Falling to the earth trailing a hot stream of jetting blood, other adult birds were on him" (330). Not only is that hapless man dangling from a tree, but so are Smith's modifiers. The love scenes, meanwhile (naturally, Smith has grafted the obligatory heterosexual romance onto the whole mess), are always good for a giggle. There's no objective reason why science fantasy should also be writing you cannot take seriously. Sadly, it often does seem to work out that way.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-23 00:00:00 Brandi Apps "The Flock" by James Robert Smith is a fiction fantasy thriller set in a Florida. The title of the novel comes from a group of prehistoric giant carnivorous birds known as Phorusrhacids. The flock has survived in the Florida wilderness and is now fighting against being discovered by men. Salutations, FL is a model, ideal and beautiful town owned by the movie studio / conglomerate Berg Bros. The movie studio wants to grow the town, however its neighbors, Marine Colonel Winston Grisham and billionaire Vance Holocomb wants to stop Berg Bros. for their own separate reasons. Enter Ron Riggs, a Fish & Wildlife employee who is called to Salutations to find out why the residents' cats and dogs go missing. Thinking a big snake is the abductor Ron hires his ex-girlfriend Mary to help him out. However, soon they will find themselves in the middle of a power struggle between three titans who will stop at nothing to further their agenda. In the midst of the power struggle they discover The Flock, a group of intelligent, pre-historic birds who have hidden from humans for centuries. "The Flock" by James Robert Smith is a fast paced thriller with wonderful pulp elements peppered in the novel. The characters are fun, even though they are stereotypical with each representing an umbrella group (militants, big business, conservationists), but their interaction is what takes this book to another level. I liked the way Mr. Smith played with his characters' names. The militant is named after the U.S's rightwing / patriotic authors etc. These characters create the engaging drama in the novel, but the giant birds are the true stars. Mr. Smith has created a somewhat believable story of how these terror birds (Titanis walleri) survived unseen and undiscovered in one of the most populous states in the union. The author has given these birds human characteristics which are interesting (although I didn't understand how come the intelligent, non-flying birds with hand instead of wings never created tools). This book was a fast read, fast paced and fun at that. The storytelling is brilliant and the descriptive prose is imaginative and detailed. Some of the chapters are written from the viewpoint of the birds, which I found to be very interesting and helped me understand their way of life. For more book reviews please visit