James Paddock's Blog - Smilodon - The Trilogy of Sabre-Toothed Cats

The original Smilodon was published in 2002. Notice that the cover has changed. Along with that came a thorough edit and re-edit of the entire book for typos and story consistency. Thus is the NEW and IMPROVED Smilodon.

Imagine recreating the saber-toothed cat for fun? The possibility sounds exciting, but the reality could be nightmarish. Within these pages you are drawn into in a world where man becomes the hunted. It is fast-paced fiction where cats change the rules and people run for their lives. “Tigers in the Wild” and a lucrative fee lure freelance writer, Zechariah Price, into the frozen mountains of Montana. The assignment drops him into a world of Bengal tigers, illegal aliens, prehistoric sabre-toothed cats, psychic premonitions and babies. As death by man and animal surrounds him, he quickly learns that he, too, is destined to become food for the cats. Trapped between man and beast, his assignment turns into that of survival. Welcome to a world where cats call the shots.

It is many years later and we want to know what has happened with Zach and his family. Did Tanya forgive him? Did either of his daughters, Rebecca and Christi, learn of the truth about what happened to their mother and father in Montana? I certainly wanted to know so I put my fingers to the keyboard to find out and before I knew it I had Sabre City.

After 8 years Zechariah Price assumes it is all behind him. Nightmares filled with huge sabre-toothed cats and women screaming still leave him in cold sweats, though less often. He had lost an eye the first time around; Tanya had fractured her back; their marriage had petered on the brink. There was no way he or any of his family was going to set foot in that Montana wilderness again. His 16-year-old daughter, however, decides otherwise and, in hopes of finding out what all the fuss was about when she was just a child, runs off to visit a Montana woman she found in a chat room. She discovers a lot more than she could have imagined, including who her father really was and how much she had inherited from him.

After that ending, holy moly I can’t believe what happened, I knew there had to be more. You can’t have a bunch of sabre-toothed cats wandering around Montana without something happening. And what about Reba? What’s with her? Curious, I woke up my computer and began, again, with the next book in the series, the one I would call The Last Sabre.

Three weeks after her mother’s death, Rebecca (Reba) Price cannot stand the oppressiveness filling her Texas home. Her sister, aunt and maybe even her father blame her. She cannot disagree. Hacking into her father’s accounts she takes what she sees as her rightful inheritance and escapes to school in Montana. She convinces herself it’s not to be near where her mother died nor near the sabre-toothed cats. However, as her freshman year ends, she is drawn back into those mountains, only to discover that the plot, which drove her mother to sacrifice herself for her family, is alive and well. As the body count rises–human and sabre-toothed feline–Reba must call upon all her inner power to find a way to bring it to a final end.

It was a lot of fun writing the sabre-toothed cat trilogy. I'm often asked if it'll ever go to four books. There is another story in there that might need telling and after 15+ years, the time may be right. Maybe I'll wait for the 20th year. As they say, where have all the children gone? Those who have read the stories will know what that means. What do you think? A 4th book, following the children?

Leave a Comment