The Traveler

The First Novel of "The Fourth Realm" Trilogy

By: John Twelve Hawks

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 15 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

Maya is hiding in plain sight in London. The 26-year-old has abandoned the dangerous obligations pressed upon her by her father and chosen instead to live a normal life. But Maya comes from a long line of people who call themselves Harlequins, a fierce group of warriors willing to sacrifice their lives to protect a select few known as Travelers.

Gabriel and Michael Corrigan are brothers living in Los Angeles. Since childhood, the young men have been shaped by stories that their late father was a Traveler, one of a small band of prophets who have vastly influenced the course of history. Travelers are able to attain pure enlightenment, and have for centuries ushered change into the world. Gabriel and Michael, who may have inherited their father's gifts, have always protected themselves by living "off the Grid", that is, invisible to the real-life surveillance networks that monitor people in our modern society.

Summoned by her ailing father, Maya is told of the existence of the brothers. The Corrigans are in severe danger, stalked by powerful men known as the Tabula, ruthless mercenaries who have hunted Travelers for generations. This group is determined to inflict order on the world by controlling it, and they view Travelers as an intolerable threat. As Maya races to California to protect the brothers, she is reluctantly pulled back into the cold and solitary Harlequin existence. A colossal battle looms, one that will reveal not only the identities of Gabriel and Michael Corrigan but also a secret history of our time.

Moving from the back alleys of Prague to the heart of Los Angeles, from the high deserts of Arizona to a guarded research facility in New York, The Traveler explores a parallel world that exists alongside our own. John Twelve Hawks' stunningly suspenseful debut is an international publishing sensation that marks the arrival of a major new talent.

Listen to the second book in this series: The Dark River: The Fourth Realm, Book 2.

©2005 John Twelve Hawks (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

“This novel’s a stunner.... You won’t want to put the book down.” (People)

“The stuff that first-rate high-tech paranoid-schizophrenic thrillers are made of.” (Time)

“A fearless, brilliant action heroine (think Uma Thurman in Kill Bill); a secret history of the world; a tale of brother against brother... and nonstop action as the forces of good and evil battle it out....Readers won’t regret taking this wild ride.” (The Times-Picayune)

Truly horrible

The writing is bad, the story is bad, the characters are not plausible... Wow. I cannot help but wonder what the other reviewers liked about this book. It was almost unbearably bad.

Blah...

I thought this novel sounded interesting. I'm a fan of kick butt action heroine stories. But the character was written like a man and the setting was way too fantastic. Like a grown-up version of G.I. Joe on LSD. Silly, and really not enhanced by Scott Brick's narration. Why oh why do they have men narrate books from a female perspective? this just enhances the masculinity of this character.

Do not waste your time

I have read almost 100 hundred books from Audible. This is the first time I couldn't finish a book.

This book is simply terrible. The premise can be summed up as a paronia. The characters are shallow. The plot is thin. Twelve Hawks repeats himself every chapter. It get gets old very quickly and makes for a very boring book.

If John Twelve Hawks believes all the stuff in his book, he must leave a horrible life.

:)

Interesting idea but ...SLOW. Don't mind slow with meat.... but this was sugary(ish). Purposefully left things unresolved in a heavy handed attempt at mystery. Reads like it wants to be a romance. Had to loose it after a couple of hours.

Couldn't finish

Heavy-handed writing with no subtlety or heart. The plot was ridiculous and the characters wooden.

Really beneath Brick

Scott Brick brings this clunker to life as he could for your local phone book. Sadly, this material is really not worth his talent.

The plot is standard Orwell ripoff with predictable over-the-top bad guys who are puppeteers for the gubmit. The good guys are supposed to be heroic, but how heroic is it to hide from the system rather than openly challenge it? They end up looking so scared and pathetic that you sometimes find yourself hoping they'll just lose that next sword fight and end their misery. But, no chance of that unless one decides to stop being maudlin and morose. If one of them starts to enjoy life they are guaranteed to lose the next sword fight. Evidently heroic misery is its own reward.

All of that would be forgiveable if the plot were the least bit imaginative. It's not. I've read better comic book plots.

Twelve Hawks introduces the book by claiming he "lives off the grid", yet here we are buying his book from the heart of the grid. I'm guessing the grid knows where to send his royalty checks. He's taking himself way too seriously.

Just happy to be done with this book!

This audiobook started with some interesting ideas, but then strayed from them to give a lecture on the problems of modern society. The authur sounds like a complete lunatic and the narrator would be better suited reading sappy poetry; both factors make this audiobook torture to listen to. Don't waste your time.

Passable but paranoid

This is not much worse than most fiction. The characters are less than two dimensional (maybe 1.5 dimensions) and the story is about as simple as they come. Otherwise the writing is not terribly bad. I was unhappily surprised to find at the non-ending of this book that it is the first in a trilogy. Although I stuck this book out to the end, I would not subject myself to another volume.

The author says that the surveillance technology described in the book is real, and exists today. Clearly some of the technology does exist today, but some seems the product of paranoia. Auto GPS systems are passive (they don?t transmit). Although many products (including tires) have ID chips, these would not be readable from any substantial distance, and the data linking the ID to a vehicle is unlikely to exist. From my experience in the software field, it is difficult to get two departments of the same company to share data. It seems unlikely to me they would share this data with the vast machine without compensation. Satellite phones, on the other hand, do transmit and are trackable and people walking around with metal swords would likely be detected by any vast machine worth its chips. The overall impression I get is this book is an elaborate excuse for not paying ones income taxes. This does not make for compelling fiction.

Too paranoid for me

I'm sorry, but I couldn't keep listening to this book past the halfway point. It's not badly written, but it has too many worn-out stereotypes to interest me. The narrator is pretty good, however.

Are you kidding me?

This book might appeal to conspiracy theorists and technopobes, but I don't know who else will like it. This book is nothing more than the paranoid rantings of a misanthrope. It is incredibly disjointed and poorly developed. Try reading Orwell's 1984; you can see how a real author handles this topic. Don't waste your time on this one.