Walton (The Genius Plague) blends volatile politics and fascinating paleontology in this riveting adventure. American scientist Samira Shannon and her University of Colorado team set out to excavate dromaeosaurid dinosaur fossils in Thailand, an expedition partially funded by the CIA. When a coup puts the government in the hands of a pro-China group suspicious of Americans, the Thai army confiscates their discoveries and arrests them as spies. Meanwhile, Thai paleontologist Kit Chongsuttanamanee works on a different set of fossils at the request of the Thai Army Weapons Research Division. Embedded in these fossils, he discovers a green liquid that creates a hallucinogenic vision of the stars in the configurations in which they appeared 66 million years ago. Kit and his colleague, Arinya Tavaranan, develop a theory that an intelligent Cretaceous avian species had the technology “to communicate memories by recording them in a physical medium that others can experience by smelling it”—leading them to postulate the existence of complex dinosaur civilizations. Walton brings rich detail to the concept of scientifically adept dinosaurs who recorded their memories for posterity on the eve of their extinction and keeps the modern timeline just as gripping with tense geopolitics, smugglers, and resurrected mammoths and dodos. Readers will be hooked. (Self-published)