The Great Zoo of China

It's Matthew Reilly's latest! (Although apparently I missed his previous one - now reading.)

China has set up a new zoo, to compete with America's Disneyland. But what can they do to be more exciting? Well, as the blurb, and other things, give away: Dragons! Because that won't go wrong at all! And so we are off to action with... well, by 'off to action', I mean the first quarter of the book is setting up ton of exposition and characters and locations and... this has to be one of his longest action stories in which the action is delayed. The Jack West Jnr books can take a while, but that gets on with it quicker.

Anyway, we get the badass CJ Cameron, the woman who is ready to battle the dragons... although she has a back story of being a vet? Not really the trained soldiers of the others, so her feats of amazingness are a little more credability-bending (unlike all the other entirely possible feats of the other characters).

Even the dragons themselves are under played. We get six different varieties... then that all goes out the window and only really have one set to worry about. So what was the point of setting all that up then?

All that adds up to not the success of his earlier books, for me.

[END]