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I only heard about the novel Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia (2000) because the anniversary of the TV movie’s release happened recently (actually, the movie was based on the prequel Casual Rex). The film’s plot seemed like a thinly-veiled attempt to cast the hidden dinosaur society (I’ll get to that in a minute) as the LGBTQ community if it were still closeted. Since I had just finished a rather huge and pondering tome, I thought a little light reading might be in order.

Fortunately, Garcia’s book was in my local public library system and I was soon in the business of reading. Also fortunately, the plot was quite a bit different than the film’s.

This will take a bit to set up. In this world (the book was published in 2000), some twelve or so dinosaur species have survived the extinction event 65 million years ago. Over the long haul, they’ve evolved just enough so that, with the proper complicated costuming, they can pass successfully as human beings. The decision to peacefully co-exist with us was made a few million years ago rather than the dinos destroying a nascent human race when they had the chance.

Dinosaurs co-habitat on this planet with people, taking human jobs and living human lives for the most part. However, a secret society exists beneath our own run by local, national, and global “councils.” Somewhere between 5 to 15% of the sapient intelligence on Earth is dinosaur, but they have infiltrated every aspect of our infrastructure including law enforcement and medical centers. This comes in handy when the need arrives to cover up an incident where a person has been revealed to be a dino.

Sounds ridiculous, right?

Our hero, Vincent Rubio, is a private detective in L.A. and he fits all the common tropes. He recently lost his partner in a mysterious accident in New York. He’s down and out, nearly broke, taking cheesy divorce cases to survive, and talks like the classic hardboiled detective.

And he’s a dinosaur, velociraptor to be exact. You wouldn’t believe the costuming involved to make this guy look human right down to the touch (yes, apparently you can convincingly have sex while in your suit, but I can’t imagine the fun in that).

He becomes involved in a mystery, quite by accident, one that tangentially involves the death of his partner. He’s hired by a rather unforgiving dinosaur detective firm to investigate a fire that destroyed a local nightclub to satisfy the insurance company. A fellow raptor, the owner, was seriously injured, and the circumstances are less than credible.

Vincent, follows the trail of clues to New York where his partner and friend Ernie was killed. He meets and interviews a combination of dinosaurs and humans trying to find the connection. This includes who really set the fire, and how a nightclub owner in L.A. is connected to high society and secret societies in the Big Apple.

Of the twelve to fifteen different types of dinos, they cannot intermarry. Well, they can, but they can’t reproduce together. A dinosaur doctor is trying to change that, and while the council is aware of his efforts, they disapprove. However, the Doc may have succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination when, during his investigation, Vincent is attacked in an alley in the Bronx by a dino freak of nature. Fortunately, he’s able to strip off his human “guise” and fight back as only a raptor can, barely dispatching his foe.

Problem. In the millions of years hominids and dinos have co-existed, no human has ever suspected that dinos still exist. Any human who finds out is immediately executed. So after the battle, Vincent uses a conveniently handy packet of disintegrator powder to reduce the other dino to bones. Then he calls a dino disposal unit.

Really, dinos, for being a minority in human culture, occupy all the right positions to hide their presence. In all those millions of years, the secret has never gotten out. This is more than incredible and it’s only one of many such story elements of the like.

The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek and much of it is played for laughs…but the mystery is real.

It’s too involved to go into, but Vincent, as much through luck as through skill, finds out the horrifying secret that was being kept both in the L.A. nightclub and in the underside of New York. A dino woman who disappeared, now resurfaces in a different identity. A socialite’s murdered dino husband had a forbidden thing about human women. A secret experiment that focused on something much more horrifying than enabling a mixed dino couple to reproduce.

Vincent finally cracks the case, nearly getting himself killed several times in the process, and pulls his life out of the ash can.

He doesn’t “get the girl,” but he does find out she escaped with her rather bizarre offspring.

It’s a fun read but try not to take the story too seriously. There were so many times when I had to suspend disbelief just to keep turning the pages. The kicker though is the mystery. Garcia does flesh it out very well. I saw the end coming but I didn’t know how the tale got me there until it happened.

Unlike the movie, the book didn’t seem to have a strong social or political aspect. There was only one passage on page 265 that tipped a hat to closeted gays:

He was so excited, he told me, that he could be the one the dinosaur community out into the open. To bring us ‘out of the closet,’ as he put it, was his fondest dream, and he wanted me to be the figure under whom it could all take place.

But no, in the end, dinos were not “uncloseted,” there was no impending human/dino war for supremacy over the Earth, and the dinos continued to live quietly among us.

To quote The A.V. Club:

“…ridiculous it is, though still a pleasurable read.”

That’s the sum of it. On to the next book.