Dawn of Mammals

Saber Tooth


 

A time gate...
A team of teen scientists...
A desperate fight to survive...


National Park Ranger Hannah Kates thinks that guiding a class of gifted high school science students through a hunt for fossil mammal bones in the Badlands will be a tough day's work. But Hannah is about to learn a new definition for the word "tough."

A rock slide at the fossil site uncovers a portal through time. The fossil hunters are caught in it and whisked back to an era when giant predator mammals roamed the earth.

They want, desperately, to find their way home. But first, they have to survive a world where bizarre--and hungry--mammals ruled North America.

They have to survive the Dawn of Mammals.

In Book 1, Saber Tooth, they are thrown back thirty million years to the world of saber-toothed nimravids, ferocious carnivores. Hannah and the nine teens will have to adapt quickly to learn the skills they'll need to survive this vicious world of tooth and claw.

An advance reader says:

"This book does for mammals what Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs."

Terror Crane



 

A time gate...
A team of teen scientists...
A desperate fight to survive....


In book 2 of Dawn of Mammals, Hannah and the kids are swept back to the Paleocene, where giant avian dinosaurs still reign as the apex predators. In a jungle world of sweltering heat, they must learn new skills to survive the reptilian swamp creatures and the dreaded Terror Crane, a half-ton bird that could snatch any one of them up with its deadly beak.

Hell Pig



In book 3 of Dawn of Mammals, Hannah and the survivors leap forward to the end of the Eocene, a time when dozens of dangerous predators roamed North America. A family of Hell Pigs, with huge jaws and bone-crushing teeth, stalk the humans. Armed with only spears and clubs, can the teenagers fight off this deadly predator?

Killer Pack

 


 


In book 4's adventure, The Miocene epoch places them nearer to home, but can they make it back without a lost team member's knowledge? After Hannah abdicates as leader, relationships shift. Ancient canids hunting in a pack bring down another human. Who will survive this epoch, and who will fall?

Mammoth



In book 5, Hannah and the other survivors arrive in the ice world of the Pleistocene. With no other game to hunt, they must take on the mighty Mastodon and his wicked tusks. Can they survive the freeze long enough to jump back to modern times?




Frequently asked questions' answers: The cover artist for the books is Igor Krstic. Yes, I wrote and released all five books in the series in less than a year (and wrote two other books in the same year). Yes, the details of fossil-hunting are correct as of the date I last did paleontology work (about seven years ago). As always, I researched additional material and all the flora and fauna are real. However, time travel is not real, though I vetted my theory about it with a physicist to make sure it was a plausible fantasy. And yes, I have more stories about the other characters planned. I'll write them between novel projects this coming year.

15 comments:

  1. I love your Dawn of Mammal series. Trying to sign up on your email list after reading Hell Pigs and cannot locate your address. Great series, looking forwrd to next book. Five stars for all of them so far!
    Best regards
    Sharon

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    1. Thanks, Sharon! I'm so glad you're enjoying them.

      On the right hand side of this page, there's a form "Sign up for the mailing list" just under Hell Pig. (Maybe I should always leave it up top! It might be easier to see that way.) It appears on every page of my blog.

      My email address is (myname at gmail), no spaces in my name. That'll get you signed up as well.

      Best,

      Lou

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  2. Whaaaaaat I read the first three in just two days, went to download number 4 and it isn't there? Love, love, love your books. Glad December is here soon.

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  3. I read all three books in two days,could'nt put them down. Went to download number 4, I have to wait until December, oh the agony. Well first time in years I'm looking forward to December. Love love love your books.

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    1. And #3 ends on such a cliffhanger, I feel guilty that #4 isn't out yet! Thanks for reading, Elke. :)

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  4. Just reread the whole series. Waiting for Mammoth is killing me!

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    1. Don't die! ;-). Mammoth is totally done, proofread, uploaded, and just waiting for Feb 9 to arrive. I set the date a month ago, but Amazon doesn't let us change that even if we wish to.

      Because, like most writers, nearly everything gives me book ideas, your comment made me think of a mystery plot. Anxiety over waiting years for book 5 of (since it happens so often, we'll make it an) epic fantasy series literally causes a woman (I could call her Cassandra!) to die of a heart attack. Her grief-stricken spouse/fiance/child becomes enraged and stalks the writer (I'll call him Cutter Gadwall) with plans to kill him in some terrible, slow way. (Maybe arsenic poisoning. I've seen a number of Forensic Files episodes about that.) Cutter has problems of his own, and, as the avenging loved one must get closer to Cutter to begin dosing his Guinness with arsenic ... (and so on).

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    2. I would totally read that! And there should be a cat. Because any woman that anxious surely has a cat. Or...maybe that's just me. ;-)

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    3. Actually now I really want to read that. But aconite is way easier to get than arsenic. And if you're willing to do the work cyanide is even easier.

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  5. I just finished the series. PLEASE I need more! ��

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    1. thank you for coming by! I really wanted to write an eight-book series with Dawn of Mammals and had it outlined like that. It hurt to have to give up it sooner because it wasn't selling well (alas, writers have to pay rent.) I loved those characters.

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  6. i just love this series! read 1-5 in 3 days. keep it up.

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    1. Thank you! I have a story collection, Timeless, coming out in May, and it'll have a story in it about Maeve (the baby that wasn't quite born yet when book 5 ended) as an old lady in our times. I enjoyed writing that.

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  7. I am reading book 5 now. Loved the series. One criticism was in book 4 when Hannah bares her soul about her family. Our family is made up of 4 children, one of whom, my youngest, had a rate chromosomal anomaly. We loved her, we all supported her, our other three children never “hated” her or our care of her. So that one small bitter detail just seemed your personal issue with children who are disabled. Just my opinion.

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    1. Glad you enjoyed the series. Sounds like you're a great mom.

      Hannah is a character. She is not me in any notable way. Other main characters I've written are Christian, Buddhist, Agnostic, Pagan, Hmong, black, white, Asian, gay, straight, and asexual. An author can't possibly be all those things. The mistake readers make that the author is his or her characters is common. In the case of my gay characters, it has resulted in a dozen pieces of hate mail telling me I'll burn in hell for being a gay man or should be ashamed for promoting "my lifestyle" (which mostly consists of sitting around in pajamas and staring at a computer, not the life of sexual excess that person seemed to imagine for me!)

      I've lived many places and had a thousand friends, and I did counseling and teaching for a living (teenagers in part, whom I do not dislike the way Hannah did). I've heard a lot of stories in that time. The story of a sibling resenting, avoiding, or disliking a developmentally disabled sibling is one I've heard in detail twice. Though neither of those people was like Hannah in any way (their fathers both still were married to their mothers, for one thing, so that resentment did not complicate things, and one was the most well-off person I've ever known well, which Hannah is definitely not), that's where I borrowed Hannah's attitude. When something real about a person sticks in my mind, particularly if it goes against what I think of TV-reality, what everything thinks is true of everyone, sometimes it ends up in a novel.

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