The Gabriel Hunt series, published by Leisure, is the brainchild of Charles Ardai, best known as the creator of the astonishingly wonderful Hard Case Crime imprint. Although each book is supposedly by Gabriel Hunt, who's also the protagonist of these wild and woolly adventures, obviously it's his "co-author" (there are several writers involved in the series) who's responsible. I'm not sure how many of the Gabriel Hunt novels have been published by now -- I think it's four -- but naturally I wanted my introduction to it to be one of Ardai's own offerings.

The series is very obviously modeled on the exploits of Indiana Jones -- perhaps "homage" might be the favoured term. This is both a blessing and a curse. The opening of Through the Cradle of Fear is pure Indie, as our near-superhuman hero craftily and spectacularly manages to escape seemingly certain death, saving not only himself but the scantily clad "romantic interest". Breathless after that, I prepared to find some ballast within the novel to hang onto while I readied myself for the next spectacular. Instead I was given a text that remained relentlessly light and superficial throughout, as if it thought I couldn't be trusted to plough through anything requiring even a scintilla of concentration. The result is a book that's not only immediately forgettable but also not hugely exciting even as one's reading it: without much by way of character creation, plot underpinning or scene setting in between times, the supposedly thrilling passages soon start failing to thrill.

This all probably sounds as if I disliked the book a lot. Not so (although I was mightily pissed off to discover when I got there that the last 45 pages or so of the book were a "bonus" adventure novella unconnected to the rest; had I known this to be so I'd have bought a different book). Hunt and his cohorts are engaging enough, and the froth entertaining enough, that I might well find myself buying another book in the series for a long plane journey, or whatever. But I'd been expecting a white-knuckler and it failed to materialize.
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