Andrew Mayne is not just your regular writer who’s vision to be a world famous writer stemmed from his very childhood. Andrew Mayne is, before anything else, a world class magician and illusionist. He only started writing books in the 2010’s and The Naturalist series came to life between 2017-2019. The Naturalist books are centred around the story of Theo Cray. A computational biologist who is also a university professor, antisocial weirdo and pretty much a genius.
3 things you’ll enjoy about reading the Naturalist Series by Andrew Mayne
Theo Cray and his pushing of all limits
Theo Cray is a very likeable character who’s super clever and each book he sets out to solve some very mysterious murders. Be it bear attacks or a grizzly pedophile, Theo Cray figure it out. The murders are usually pretty gruesome and Andrew Maybe is not afraid to go further than he perhaps should. I’m talking shallow graves dotted with spring buds (because human corpses are a great fertiliser, obviously) and Theo Cray digging up dead bodies, stuffing them into bin liners and dragging them to the police station all by himself. Some of the scenes and situations that Theo creates and gets himself into are not realistic. But they are just on the verge of being painful and being the perfect push for the plot.
The speed you’ll read the book in
The books are written in a very fast-paced language. You don’t have to re-read a single page twice and the plot moves every so quickly. There’s just the right amount of direct speech, chapters, paragraphs to never lose the thought. The whole series is connected very smoothly throughout. Once you’ve finished book 1 you’ll already be buzzing for book 2. Reading The Naturalist very much reminds me of binging a series on Netflix. It’s not a masterpiece by no means, but it’s the perfect compromise between mainstream, quirky and mysterious that keeps hold of you until the very last word. You might even feel like you want to fast forward just so you finally know what happens at the end!
Damn beautiful book covers
I applaud the creator of the book covers for this series because it’s just stunning. I got paperbacks so I could read them on the tram to work and even the paperbacks are gorgeous. The hardbacks in Czech are the absolute top though – the cover art is textured with holographic elements and the result is so eye-catching you won’t ever miss them when you’re in a book store. You can buy the paperbacks online here but I definitely recommend checking out the hardback in your country because they are simply stunning.
And one thing that’ll probably annoy the crap out of you…
This series is brilliant and I’ve enjoyed it with all my heart. But the plot is just not perfect. There are some serious plot holes that will grind your gears. I sometimes felt that the author just didn’t know how to push the plot forward so he came up with a crappy excuse of a twist. I felt this the most in book 3 which was a little disappointing but I still recommend you read all four of them nonetheless.
You might be wondering why there are so many book reviews popping up on the blog lately. The answer is in this post.