Well, that might be pushing the envelope...but for this fangirl, it was definitely a moment to squee.

I had an email yesterday from a London based musician called Jer Randall. Jer and his brother Chris are the boys behind the songs and music in the 2001 movie Phoenix Blue starring, you guessed it, my current actor, James Murray.

Because of my interest in the film, I had tried to find a soundtrack for it, but drew a blank, other than snippets of Steven Parson's lovely intrumentals, a solo video clip and one single cd of Tailspin(through Amazon), by Jer and Chris plus their band Widescreen. Other than ripping the music off the soundtrack, there appeared to be no other avenue to hear the music sans movie.

Then yesterday I get a brief email from Jer himself. Apparently he read my review of the single on Amazon and got in touch with me.

*squee*

I didn't believe it at first...but he wrote back and directed me to his myspace site..

http://www.myspace.com/greyghostwidescreen

where there is some of his more recent work. How cool is that!!

Now I can add Jer to my list of backroom boys that I've been in contact with since my Primeval fandom jumped into high gear. I've 'talked' via forum and LJ with Steven Savile, author of the first Primeval tie-in book, chatted on myspace with one of the lads in the publicity department for Primeval S2, and now made contact with Jer Randall....only two degrees of separation from Primeval through James Murray/Phoenix Blue.

It's a small world....

*squee*

Review: Shadow of the Jaguar by Steven Savile (Titan Books)

Disclaimer: I make no claims to being a professional reviewer, not even a competent one. I'm a fan of the first two series of Primeval, with a particular liking for the character Stephen Hart. That said, I've tried to give a balance review as much as possible without entirely spoiling the plot.

The Book:

Nicely presented scaled down hardback, unusual choice in cover design colour(green with red lettering), but eye catching with a crisp image of Nick Cutter(Douglas Henshall) wielding a Japanese sword with a Smilodon baring it's fangs behind him on the front, group shot on the back. No equivocation about it being a tv tie in and also hints at whose perspective will tell the story.

The Blurb:

A delirious backpacker crawls out of the dense Peruvian jungle muttering about the impossible things he has seen... A local ranger reports seeing extraordinary animal tracks and bones – fresh ones – that he cannot explain....

Cutter and the team are plunged into the hostile environment of the Peruvian rainforest where they endure a perilous journey towards something more terrifying than they could possibly have imagined....

My Review:

Hmmm well.....I have to say that the descriptions of the Peruvian jungle, its wildlife and the general climate were enough to put me off going there for life. The depiction of the expedition to investigate the strange going's on just drips with sweat, bugs and blood. Buckets and buckets of it.

This is one of the most blood soaked stories I have read in a long time. It quite surprised me, not expecting things to get quite so R rated in its depiction of shredded bodies and wholesale bloodletting by the prehistoric creatures prowling the jungle.

I surprised me only for as long as it took to remind myself that the tv series hasn't exactly been squeamish about throwing around body parts and blood itself....it's just done off camera or within the PG rating of the prime time viewing, rather than in the graphic way it was portrayed in SOTJ.

It made me really wonder how Cutter and his team actually survived at all...but that's jumping ahead.

The story is supposedly set sometime after the second episode of season two as it mention the raptors(yes I know they're not but humour me) in the shopping mall and the worms in the tower block. Jenny is very much in evidence but I did wonder about her being sent into this situation. She's PR, not diplomatic relations, but hey, she's accepted as part of 'the team' so she had to be there. The core, Cutter, Connor, Abby and Stephen all dance around each other and work reasonably well together with only brief lapses into angst of the whole 'affair with Helen' scenario, although there is plenty of foreshadowing and it keeps within the canon of the series as regards the banter between the characters.

It does veer off at times into purely gratuitous scenes as remarked by other reviewers. I thought the flying suit by Stephen and the walkabout by Abby and Connor not entirely out of context as they were supposed to be doing touristy things, and the 'cloak & dagger' got a bit tiresome as it only held up the story rather than moved it along. Each of the characters were given a chunk of the story to take center stage in – Jenny with the hospital, Abby with the sewing kit, Stephen and the tracking, Connor and the village, but on the whole they were all given fairly equal 'screen time' throughout the story. In between the action bits were very well researched informative bits – like one part where Stephen explains how he does the whole tracking of animals thing – and there are others spread out throughout the text which imparted snippets of hyper-knowledge and made it more interesting. Alongside those were a liberal use of scientific terms for the creatures without any elaborate explanations, so I'll be looking some of the references up to satisfy my own curiosity.

The last few chapters raced by, the action thick and fast albeit a little improbable. I really didn't grasp the why the 'thing controlling the others' creatures felt the need to use them for wholesale, senseless slaughter, or get a grasp of what it was or where it came from, the past or the future, and against the odds they were facing, no one should have survived the rope bridge, let alone the temple.

I also tended to skip past the scene of Stark getting Jenny – it smacked of these first person virtual reality video games my sister plays ad nauseum or maybe a Rambo movie.

As the story was rubber stamped by the creators of the series, one can only boggle at what they'd do if they didn't have to make the series suitable for minors to watch.

Conclusion:

SOTJ is an often violent, flesh rending episode of a Primeval gone horribly pear shaped, to quote Connor. Steven Savile has done a superlative job in getting the reader right there beside the characters, suffering the heat and general ickiness of the environment, of portraying just how out of their depth they truly are beyond the boundaries of the civilised English countryside.

Will I read it again? Probably not for a little while. Would I recommend it to read? Certainly, if you like the series and the characters and don't mind a body count to rival a Die Hard movie. The author drops you into a world that is entirely alien to most of us, makes you sweat along with the characters, gets you good and filthy, scares the bejeezus out of you then gets everyone back – well, nearly every one back – safe and sound in time for the next episode.

I only hope they all had some serious, post traumatic counseling afterwards – they sure would have needed it.

Oh, and Lester gets some wonderful, snarky lines to utter from the safety of his pin striped suit.