$8.99 paperback, when it opens
Not on sale yet. Nothing here has cleared the publisher’s own gate: no volume has a typeset interior, a print wrap, or an ISBN in either format, and the ebook price has not been ruled. Every free page on this site is finished and true — the whole first chapter, ten Field Notes, ten builds — and the shop opens when the books do. Write to orders@dinoroost.com to be told when.
Dinoroost · Book Four of ten
The Collar and the Key
A girl comes up the flooded causeway in the dark with an eighteen-foot raptor and a steel band bolted round its throat.
Forty kids live in seven impossible trees over a drowned city, and they do not tame dinosaurs, they ask them. Downriver, a hundred and twelve kids live in a ballpark, keep a ledger of everything anybody owes, and put collars on their animals instead.
Kit Ossory used to close those collars, and she was good at it. Now she is standing outside the Gate with nothing to trade, asking a village of strangers to take a risk they cannot afford — because the thing on Nine’s neck has no keyhole, no latch and no way out, and getting it off takes eleven minutes, two people, a hand file, and somebody brave enough to hold the animal’s head.
The picture out of this one
A hand file against steel at midnight, with the whole village standing still.
The spotlight
Kit Ossory
13, defector
Came up the river from the Tally in the best-made coat in the Grove, and stands at an angle to whoever is talking so the door stays over her shoulder.
Matched to Nine, Utahraptor. Eighteen feet and an appallingly quiet lope. Named for the number off her old tag, kept so nobody gets to pretend it did not happen. She steals hats and wears them terribly.
In the back — Field Notes
Utahraptor
Utahraptor — the size of the thing, and how we know it was feathered.
In the back — Make It
A gate knot that holds while you want it to and falls apart in your hand when you do not.
Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
| Spotlight | Kit Ossory, 13, defector |
| Reading age | Ages 9-12 · Grades 4-6 · grade 3–4 text under a grade 4–6 story |
| Length | 22,286 words · eighteen chapters · a two-hour read |
| 5.5 x 8.5 in · Paperback, perfect bound, black-and-white interior · about 132 pages, not yet confirmed from a proof | |
| Paperback ISBN | not yet issued |
| EPUB ISBN | not yet issued |
| Illustrations | None yet — text and cover |
| Content | Peril yes, cruelty no. No child dies, no swearing, no romance, and nothing anybody builds is meant to hurt anyone |
| Written by | Jory Hark — a pen name |
← Book Three, The Salt Run · Book Five, Nine Small Thieves →
Questions about this one
Eight answers,
from this book’s own file.
Every one of these is a fact out of the manuscript or the catalogue rather than a sales line — the measured word count, the drawings that actually exist, the animal on the nonfiction page at the back.
What happens in The Collar and the Key?
A girl comes up the flooded causeway in the dark with an eighteen-foot raptor and a steel band bolted round its throat.
Who is it about?
Kit Ossory, 13, defector. A hand file against steel at midnight, with the whole village standing still.
How long is The Collar and the Key?
About 22,286 words across eighteen chapters, a cold open and a tag - roughly a two-hour read for a confident reader in the 9-12 band.
Is it illustrated?
Not yet. This volume ships with a cover and no interior drawings; Books One, Two and Three have eighteen each.
Do I have to read the others first?
Reading order is publication order, and there is no other order. This is Book Four of ten, and it closes its own problem, so it can be read on its own - but the season runs a clock under all ten and it reads better in order.
What is the nonfiction page at the back?
Utahraptor. Utahraptor — the size of the thing, and how we know it was feathered. The page names its own sources and says which parts of the story were invented, and it is free to read on this site.
What do you build at the back?
A gate knot that holds while you want it to and falls apart in your hand when you do not. Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
Is anything in it frightening?
Peril yes, cruelty no. No child dies, there is no swearing and no romance, and nothing anybody builds in these books is meant to hurt anyone - that last one is the first of the three Laws the series runs on.
