Dangerous New World. Old-Fashioned Hero.
That's the tag-line on the back cover of Wade Boss: Hybrid Hunter, and it's the controlling image for the story. Wade Boss is the kind of action hero I loved reading about when I was a young man: brave and capable, but also good-hearted, with a sense of humor. He's an animal trainer who works in Hollywood, but he comes from Texas, and he's cut from the cloth of the American cowboy.
When the story opens, Wade gets a call from the LAPD to help capture an escaped tiger that has made its way into an old lady's garage. Except that when Wade finally corners the animal, it turns out not to be a tiger, but a half-tiger hybrid monster. By the skin of his teeth Wade captures the creature alive, and this puts him on the radar of a covert, government hybrid-hunting agency.
Wade soon learns that this hybrid phenomenon is a growing problem, unbeknownst to the general public. Each hybrid is unique, and no one knows who is creating them – or setting them loose. Wade discovers that he has a special talent for catching the creatures, but his moonlighting as a hybrid hunter quickly throws his orderly life into disarray. He keeps trying to back out of the whole crazy business, but his highly-tuned conscience won't let him rest as long as innocent lives are in danger.
During my days as a middle and high school English teacher, parents would express to me how difficult it was to find decent new material for their teenagers to read. And by "decent" they didn't just mean well-written, they meant optimistic, uplifting, wholesome – not obsessed with darkness. Wade Boss: Hybrid Hunter is my answer to that lament. It's principally an action-adventure story, but with a lot of subtlety and humor layered in – and even some (clean) romance!