A piece of airport fiction that is executed with workman-like competence that will keep you turning pages, but leaves no lingering impression with you once you finish.  Most of the book follows a very familiar formula; take your copaganda procedural of choice, say,  NCIS/Bones/Law and Order: SVU and add Pleistocene megafauna sprinkled in for flavor.  And it is just a sprinkle--don't expect the mammoths to be the star of the show the way dinosaurs were for Jurassic Park.  There is an explosive turn late as the book as things become more of a thriller.  Antagonists make sweeping statements about the status of humanity, and so forth. You've seen an American blockbuster movie before, it's that. It mostly works.

Is it good though?  Not particularly.  It's not particularly bad, either, it's extremely adequate.  If you pick this up at an airport, you will have something to read on the plane, and you won't be particularly upset if you forget it at your hotel room at the conclusion of your trip.

One thing, though: the author's afterward makes some wild claims about

hominid evolution, including one regarding a link between Homo neanderthalensis and autism that is just flat-out wrong

.