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HUNT AMONG THE KILLERS OF MEN is the latest in the action series featuring exotic locations, running gun battles, fist fights. Gabriel Hunt is the descendant of all those pulp adventures from the thirties/forties.
Gabriel’s long absent kid sister, Lucy, pops into his life one day asking for help. He’d seen her twice in nine years, which was two more times than brother Michael. A friend of hers, Mitch(Michelle), was charged with killing her sister and it was all tied in with a criminal named Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, a Russian claiming to be Chinese who’s intention is to take over crime in China. He heads the CCC, Chinese Cooperative Confederation, and he’s looking for a singular object to solidify his claim as Chinese: the legendary life size terra cotta statue of Kangxi Shih-k’ai, the last great Chinese warlord. His skeleton is supposed to be inside. Most don’t believe it really exists.
Mitch had been Air Force until an accident happened and they needed a scapegoat cover a superior officer. And after all she was just a woman. Mitch had come to New York to stay with her sister until she could get her stuff together. Hardly had she arrived, when the sister had to leave for a meeting with Cheung.
It was the last time she saw her alive.
The body was found in a dumpster with her throat cut AND a bullet in the chest. Mitch was waiting at the apartment and, incredibly, was arrested and charged with the crime. Material witness, the authorities said. But Lucy knew better and went to her elder brother for help. When Mitch leaves against orders from Hunt and slips into China to try to kill the criminal warlord, Gabriel has to take off fast.
The trail takes him into China and that country’s shadowy underworld. Gabriel gets involved with two killers: Ivory, Heung’s second in command, and the beautiful Qingzhao, once in Ivory’s position and branded the Nameless One. One wants to kill the crime lord, the other is torn.
Hunt knows he needs to find this statue, if it exists(and evidence turns up to suggest it might), before Cheung can and cement his place in the Chinese criminal hierarchy. Face is very important and if he can’t prove his legitimacy somehow, the next phase can’t move ahead. The crime warlord has a plan to blanket as much of the world with a new drug, a hallucinogen, very dangerous. He cares not as it will make him wealthy.
Lots of action, as always in the Hunt series, maybe slightly more violent than previous entries, if that’s possible, another winning entry in the adventure series, this one is by David J. Schow. The release date has been moved up to next Tuesday, the 22nd.
