Ramón Espejo is not a nice man. An irritable, misanthropic loner and brawler, he's most at ease out in the wilderness, prospecting for rare metals. In town, he's a powderkeg with a short fuse. So when an impulsive act of his results in the murder of an offworld human diplomat, he naturally hightails it away to the empty frontier until things cool off.

But once in the wilderness, his luck worsens. Setting off a "coring explosive," he accidentally uncovers a secret alien refuge. The aliens are like no race ever before encountered by humanity—and they resent having their cover blown. Ramón is swiftly enslaved—literally leashed by a living punishment tether to a big ugly alien named Maneck.

Maneck and his peers, communicating with difficulty due to their extreme alien concepts, inform Ramón that a different human has also stumbled upon their camp and must be silenced. Reasoning that the best hunter of a human is another human, they enlist Ramón to stalk the fleeing man.

Now begins a cat-and-mouse chase through a wild terrain stuffed with deadly lifeforms such as chupacabras and redjackets. But whether Ramon is the hunter or the hunted—and what will happen if he should be lucky enough to return to civilization, where the powerful and arrogant Enye await—remain to be seen.

A thriller mated to an SF adventure

The first item of business to get out of the way is the tripartite authorship of this book. At first it seems a rather circuslike distraction that, however, has actually resulted in a superb fusion of talents. The names Martin and Dozois carry with them certain expectations as regards style and themes. The name Abraham does less so, just because of his shorter track record. But I can happily report that Martin's predilection (at least as exhibited in his early SF) for baroque interplanetary adventures blends well with Dozois' focus on the average man under strains and stresses. As for Abraham's contribution, I seem to see a certain propulsiveness of plotting and streamlining of prose. In any case, the book reads like the work of one melded intelligence, seamless and organic.

In Ramón, the authors have created an appallingly attractive antihero straight out of Leigh Brackett's canon. His rough-and-tumble progress from unknowingness to self-awareness is handled deftly all the way. And since this journey is the core of the story, you've got a solid foundation or center on which to hang the other pendants of the narrative, SF or otherwise, such as the wry portrait of Maneck's race.

But this is no drawing-room psychological novel. Ramón's maturation is enfolded in a thriller that reads like some lost Gold Medal Paperback Original by John D. MacDonald or William P. McGivern. Hunter's Run has definite noir underpinnings—its title could even pass for a classic noir film title—which come out explicitly in the end when Ramón has cause to think about the power structures inherent in societal and interpersonal relations: that classic noir theme.

This novel is at once old-fashioned—like some dream collaboration between B. Traven (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1927]) and Keith Laumer—and also as up to date as the latest M. John Harrison.