Hunter »

James Byron Huggins is the author of Cain, Leviathan, The Reckoning, and A Wolf Story. A former soldier, cop, and award-winning journalist, he lives in Decatur, Alabama.

An unbeatable combination of wilderness adventure, tracker's lore, and high-tech thriller, Hunter offers the most riveting action since Dean Koontz's Watchers.

When it comes to action, no one does it better than James Byron Huggins, and Hunter, a pulse-pounding thriller, is his best work yet. Hunter is the ultimate tracker, the world's best. If you're lost, Hunter can find you -- whether you want him to or not. Still, Hunter is particular about the searches he takes on. So when the military men seeking his help are very secretive about the mission they're recruiting him for, Hunter's instincts tell him to refuse. But there is a beast loose somewhere north of the Arctic Circle and it's already charged through a secret research facility, wiping out the elite military squad that had been guarding it. And this raging superhuman monster is headed south for civilization, ready to wreak bloody devastation.

It's a job that Hunter can't turn down, but what he discovers here in the wilderness is that terror has a form, that a renegade agency has let a half-human abomination escape into the wild. This almost invulnerable creature was created through a series of outlawed genetic experiments that have left it with a hunger for human blood. And may have made it immortal.

Kirkus Reviews

Volcanic, hypergalactic supersequel to Huggins's Cain (1997), which was bought for film by Bruce Willis. Hunter, which has been bought by Sylvester Stallone, goes on thematically where Cain left off, though it has different characters. Previously, the superhuman supersoldier, part human, part titanium Armor (like Arnold the Terminator), had superspeed, could rip through steel walls, and had a "volcanic" hunger (Huggins tends to overuse certain words) for apocalyptic evil. That story has been left hanging, awaiting its sequel. Instead, Huggins carries on with an imitation figure, a humanoid monster injected with DNA from a 10,000-year-old metarace of killers. This monster, like Cain, is Frankensteined together by a secret government military research agency. Earlier, the beast was hunted down by a polymathic Marine colonel, himself almost superhuman; here, the beast is pursued by Hunter, a tracker with supersenses who's accompanied by an oversized black wolf. After the nameless maximonster attacks and destroys every man on a military installation, and also bare-handedly breaks the neck of a 700-pound saber-toothed tiger, Hunter is enlisted to track the creature to its prehistoric family cave in White Mountains Park. A team of soldiers with him fires on the beast but barely hurts him. As it says, I am immortal! At last, though, Hunter and the beast fall into volcanic hand-to-hand combat, trading blows that would jelly or behead a normal man, a battle raging like hot lava for page after page of comic-strip panels.