The Traveller John Twelve Hawks Bantam Press Hbk £12.99 July 2005 L. J. Hurst

Not every father teaches his daughter how to fight by dropping her into the crowds after an Arsenal versus Chelsea football match and then follows her swordplay in the corridors of the London Underground, but Thorn is a Harlequin and his daughter, Maya, is his heir. They must do right and she must learn how to protect the few remaining Travellers.

"Is there anybody there?" a traveller asked long ago. Nobody answered. Now when a Traveller asks the same question the answer might be the same, the Travellers have gone, and that is because there are so few Harlequins to protect them. Indeed, Travellers might never ask because, orphaned, they might have no idea of their bloodline.

Where had the Travellers voyaged before? To put it shortly, in astral realms, and when one is on the astral plane one's physical body is left exposed. However, most of us do something like that for eight hours every night and we don't find ourselves waking to find we have been eaten by mutant hyenas in the night, but that is because we are drones and citizens, not Travellers and Harlequins. We are drones because we have given into The Tabula, or The Brethren as they sometimes call themselves, and the Travellers are now easier bait because The Brethren control the Vast Machine - computers, CCTV, passport controls, ID checks which record where every one may be found every minute. When any one's location is known it is then much easier to kill rebels - those who reject the machine.

Maya is lucky - she starts to reject her Harlequin inheritance but is reconciled with her father before his murder in Prague. In the USA Michael and Gabriel Corrigan have lost their way - Gabriel is a biker drop-out though Michael is a businessman trying to get in the Chamber of Commerce - but that can be explained, their childhood home was raided and destroyed, their parents vanished, they had to live on their wits to reach adulthood. It has meant, though, that they know nothing of their Traveller inheritance - neither has yet reached out for the astral plane.

If the Corrigans go travelling will they take the left-hand path or the right-hand path? But there are two brothers and - depending on who captures or befriends whom - each might take a separate path and journey. If a Harlequin can find one or both of the Corrigans then their journey will follow the right-hand path; if either is taken by The Brethren they will be sent on their sinister mission.

The Brethren are not in power - they are power, they are behind power and they are in advance of it. They co-opt power as they co-opt members. When they cannot exercise it in government they exercise it covertly. They have two names, but they have other fronts as well. They have Foundations, they have research laboratories, and they have influence in universities. The Brethren want order and hate disorder; they hate it to the extent that they want only law and obedience. They hate independence or anything like a declaration of it - they hate anyone who says Leave Me Alone. Every camera on the street, every bar code, every RFID tag, every computer network, every database, every ID number, every name badge brings the ideal world of The Brethren closer. They have existed for millennia but never have they come so close to realising their ideal world as now when every government act to make the world safer from terrorism delivers it more tightly into the hands of these secret masters.

The Traveller is about paranoia.

The Traveller is the first volume of THE FOURTH REALM trilogy. For some reason his British publishers are not emphasising this - it appears only in small print on the final page. As a stand-alone novel this works perfectly, but let me say this - in the synopsis above I have missed one enormous detail that must grow in significance - it could be world-shaking. Dan Brown's previous paranoid thrillers have ridden into the best-seller lists on the back of The Da Vinci Code but if - perhaps when - John Twelve Hawks' name is repeated on the best-seller lists it will not be with separate novels, but with the volumes of the Fourth Realm.

John Twelve Hawks may not exist - he deals with his agent and publisher only through a third party. I trust they got the six-figure advance to him safely. Or perhaps John Twelve Hawks is a pen-name for a partnership or team - he describes Prague as an outsider, and most of the story is set in California and New York, but his description of London after the Arsenal-Chelsea match is better than most Americans'. There are some idiosyncrasies in the writing, too. Chapters end either with dialogue, or else with a factual statement with a final loose phrase which requires repetition, so that closing sentences disproportionately include "and". Forensic linguists may have a field day identifying John Twelve Hawks, or who wrote which chapter from their individual styles.

Dan Brown did not invent the paranoid thriller, and there are echoes, sometimes just single words, from many other authors in the construction of The Traveller. Michael de Larrabetti's Borrible trilogy about feral children in London came to mind at one level, while the use of "citizens" to describe the work-a-day world comes from Robert Heinlein. In 1984 Thurston Clarke published his only novel, Thirteen O'clock, about an enemy of George Orwell building the computerised surveillance society that threatens us today. The threat appears in novels published this year, such as Steve Martini's Double Tap and even Michael Connelly's latest police procedural The Closers, but none of them have woven the web of paranoia so tight before. How many people will notice that the system that delivers The Traveller to our bookshops is the system that must deliver us over to The Brethren? And how many of them will dare speak?