The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul

Fantastic, superb, wonderful – John Saul’s The Manhattan Hunt Club.
ISBN: 0449006522. 363 pages. Publisher: Ballantine Books. RRP: $7.99. ©2001


A
beautifully crafted tale that will drag you in instantly. The story
revolves around (MC), his father and lover, Heather. The central story
is very standard at first. Jeff Converse interrupts a brutal rape. His
interference stops the attacker, but the victim sees only him and he is
falsely accused … and sentenced.

And this is where the story
throws a curveball. On the way to prison, the transport van is involved
in a car crash. Jeff is pulled from the wreck and taken into the
subway. Following his rescuer, he is led into the underground world.
And taken to a dark room, where he meets Jagger. A real messed up dude
who confuses friendship for love, he has hidden homosexual needs. He’s
also a big guy.

They are introduced to the “game”. Get out of
the underground tunnels and you go free. Sounds easy enough. What they
don’t know is that armed homeless guys itching to kill guard each exit.

Throw
into the mix, Jinx, a homeless girl who lives in the tunnels under the
city, who through her own research (and knowledge of the crime of which
Jeff is accused) finds out for sure that Jeff is innocent. She decides
to enter the “hunting arena” and help him escape.

Also entering the tunnels are his father and lover Heather. Who father is in “The Hunt Club”.

This book rocked. I do have a few complaints though:

Jeff
is not made to seem real, a badly crafted character. I didn’t care if
he lived or not. I did though, care about the father and Jinx. These
characters are well drawn. The father is easy to dislike.
Heather and her fathers relationship is not developed (could be an editorial dispute), so who cares if she kills him.
One minute, Jeff’s father is carrying a 7.62mm M-14A1 next he is handling a Steyr SSG-PI. Hmm.
Sometimes,
the viewpoint changed for like a paragraph, one minute we are reading
Jeff’s thought and worries, next paragraph Jagger interrupts, then back
to Jeff. Luckily it doesn’t happen very often and is easy to miss.
Good points:

The story flows easily and reads just as easily.
The confusion (resulting in Jeff’s arrest) is well explained from the viewpoint of the victim.

The ending rush through the underground world is tense
Overall
this book is well worth a few days to read, yes a few days. It’ll hook
you as most John Saul’s books do. One thing was missing from the ending
though, what happened to Jeff’s conviction? It wasn’t mentioned, three
subplots were closed and closed kind of “too” nicely. But it really
bugs me not to know what happened with the conviction.