cover image The Traveler

The Traveler

John Twelve Hawks. Random House Audio Publishing Group, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-7393-1636-8

This production opens with an unintentionally hilarious interview with the author, who ""lives off the Grid,"" according to his bio, and protectively distorts his voice for a discussion of his book's relevance to the contemporary matrix of governmental and corporate interference in daily life. The author's grandiose paranoia is overblown, but Carradine does a solid job of keeping a straight face with his reading. Carradine's gravelly, folksy voice conveys the twists and turns of Hawks' action-adventure narrative, lending a weary dignity to his tale of Maya, a twentysomething scion of a group of mercenaries whose sworn duty it is to protect the Travelers, a secret group of great men. Maya yearns to break free of her obligations, but she is forced to help Gabriel and Michael, two brothers who discover that they are Travelers. Carradine may not be able to save Hawks' book entirely from its aura of pompousness, but he makes a fine effort nonetheless.