The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser

Publisher's Synopsis

Frank is a service station owner on a little-used highway who just wants a quiet life. His granddaughter has been sent to stay with him to fix her attitude, but they don’t talk a lot.

When a badly injured young woman arrives at Frank’s service station with several cars in pursuit, Frank and a handful of unsuspecting customers are thrust into a life-or-death standoff.

But who are this group of men and women who will go to any lengths for revenge? And what do they want? Other than no survivors …?

A ferociously fast-paced, filmic, visceral, tense and utterly electric novel, unlike anything you’ve read before. Set on a lonely, deserted highway, deep in the Australian badlands,

The Hunted is white-knuckle suspense matched to the fast-paced adrenaline of a Jack Reacher novel and the creeping menace of Wake in Fright. This is unmissable reading. . .

My Review 

"Owning a roadhouse hadn’t been high on the list of life goals when Frank was a kid. But then there wasn’t much high on that list, and as years passed and options dwindled, he’d found himself entertaining a half-baked fantasy of solitude and routine. He’d bought the roadhouse for a pittance, along with the house, the whole catastrophe spanning no more than a couple of acres. He’d let himself settle in the quiet and hoped that, in time, it would rub off on him."

Make no mistake, this is an absolute bloodbath so if you’re a squeamish reader you’re going to want to avoid this one.

The Hunted is described by some as a brutal cautionary tale and I think that ably sums it up.

Frank owns a roadhouse that sits out in the middle of nowhere. It represents the last chance of petrol before motorists drive on further into remote Australia. He admits he prefers being alone and has accepted the solitude of his life.

But he has been thrown for a loop by the arrival on his doorstep of his granddaughter and is still adjusting to life with her.

Meanwhile Simon has met a girl, Maggie, in a bar, a chance encounter that results in her joining him as he embarks on his driving tour to discover the real Australia.

What they encounter when they stray off the beaten track is a small town that is inhabited by crude but seemingly hospitable people. This proves to be a poor personality profile reading by the unfortunate travellers.

It is the encounter with the townsfolk that the nightmare begins and the brutality ensues. It turns out, they like to hunt but their preferred quarry is human. It also triggers a type of survival instinct in Maggie that had been hidden until her back is against the wall.

"That same something that had caused her to run in the first place. That something that had always scared her because she could never get away from it. A furnace, deep and white hot, stoking a fire that she had always tried to hold at bay because to succumb to it was to become something less than human, something animal."

The hunt leads to Frank’s roadhouse (which is kind of inevitable given the set up provided above). From here the pace of the story, which was pretty hectic to start with, really move into overdrive.

Don’t go looking too hard for character development because there are really only three reasons for any character to appear in this book. There’s the heroes of the story who will somehow survive the onslaught, there’s the cannon fodder characters who are going to be sacrificed for the sake of heightened drama and there’s the monsters who are perpetrating the evil attack.

Action and pace of the story aside, things really start to slip into the realm of the unbelievable once the showdown gets underway at the service station and Frank’s house. This is because of the inexplicable ludicrous motives of the townsfolk combined with their seeming unwillingness to actually co-ordinate themselves to get their job done.

There is a sense of inevitability about how the hopelessly outnumbered “good guys” are going to fare against the ruthless, rabid hunters who promise to show no mercy in their quest.

For all of that, I found The Hunted to be an extremely quick read. It was absorbing and full of hugely descriptive action sequences. I decided it was better not to dwell on the almost non-existent explanation for why the hunters did what they did.

This is your typical good vs evil battle set in a remote region of Australia. The landscape is as harsh and unforgiving as the bad guys providing a true metaphor for why bad things happen to good people. They just do.Prepare yourself, don’t look for a deeper meaning and allow the action to wash over you.

Prepare yourself, don’t look for a deeper meaning and allow the action to wash over you.