The narrator of Hunted is Edward York, the son of one of the Admirals on the High Council. He and his dead sister Samantha were illegal clones of the Admiral, complete with illegal genetic engineering. Unfortunately, Edward's engineering went wrong, and he's a bit stupid. Due to his handicap, Edward's disappointed father has put him in the low-prestige Explorer Corps. But on Samantha the engineering worked, and she was brilliant. She (with Edward along as bodyguard) was sent to the planet Troyen, occupied by a neat alien species called Mandasars, to try to improve relations between the Mandasars and another species, the Fasskisters. This happened 35 years prior to the action of the story. And 20 years prior to the story, despite Samantha's efforts, war broke out on Troyen. Samantha was killed, along with the High Queen of the Mandasars -- who, we learn, was Edward's "wife," in an apparent diplomatically arranged quasi-marriage. Edward has spent 20 years marooned in the Troyen system: no one can leave, because anyone directly involved in the war is a killer, who will immediately be killed upon leaving the system.

All that is back story, revealed gradually to us. The real story starts with Edward finally rescued from the Troyen system, en route to Celestia, a human colony which accepted millions of Mandasar children as refugees at the start of the war. But as soon as the ship leaves the system, everyone on board is killed, except Edward. He finds a dead Mandasar queen on board, as well as a lot of dangerous nanotech, which seems designed to gather the "venom" produced by the queens, which may have a number of biochemical uses. When Edward reaches Celestia, he finds the navy curiously uninterested in the problem. Threatened with another stint in exile, he escapes (with the help of some fellow Explorers) to the planet's surface. There he finds some of the exiled Mandasar children, now grown, and they treat him with unusual respect.

Here we learn what makes the Mandasars so interesting: they have several "castes," like social insects: a neuter "worker" caste, a male "warrior" caste, and a female "gentle" caste. In addition, some gentles become Queens, and the Queens control all the others by means of pheromones. Thus, Mandasars are, in a sense, natural "monarchists." Edward's status (Royal Consort) apparently makes the Mandasars willing to follow him. They tell him of an ongoing effort by some humans on Celestia to use the Mandasars' social nature against them: when isolated, their individual capacities are exaggerated, such that the "workers" become willing slaves, and the "warriors" become fiercer and less inhibited, and the "gentles" become amoral scientific geniuses.

Edward tries to help the free Mandasars struggle against these "recruiters," and in the process bumps into Festina Ramos, who is also investigating the recruiters. Festina realizes that there must be an Admiral behind all this, and that the real answer to a number of mysteries lies back on Troyen. So Festina, some other Explorers, Edward and his Mandasar family, and an unusual human/alien hybrid all head back to war-torn Troyen, where a whole lot of untangling of threads occurs, in the midst of plenty of well-depicted action, and all is resolved in a very satisfying manner.

It's instructive just to list the ingredients Gardner has thrown into his pot: several neat alien races, nanotechnology, telepathy and some clever uses of it, precognition, a man with a glass stomach, at least two varieties of human/alien hybrid, genetic engineering, some diabolical weapons tech. Mix in plenty of scheming, plenty of action, plenty of colour. The result is a compelling adventure story, and lots of fun for the reader.

The book isn't perfect. You do have to swallow some of the basic implausibilities of the entire series: mainly the League of Peoples' ability to detect and kill "dangerous non-sentients" (and what seem to me to be inconsistent and sometimes changing rules defining "dangerous non-sentients"), as well as the hard-to-believe rationale behind the "expendable" Explorer Corps. In addition, the bad guys are pretty cartoonishly bad. And the ending, while satisfying, has aspects of deus ex machina to it, though those aspects were at least foreshadowed fairly well. (I'd quibble, too, that as psi powers go I hate precognition, but I think that's a personal quirk of mine, and it can't be held against the book.) But these weaknesses didn't stop me from enjoying myself immensely as I gobbled this book down.