The formula I'm talking about goes like this: an intrepid hero leads a small, hastily thrown together group to face a formidable opponent. Although facing seemingly insurmountable odds, being hopelessly outnumbered and shockingly ill-equipped, it is up to them – and them alone - to stave off their adversaries. The fate of the human race is in their hands with failure unthinkable but success extremely unlikely. It's the "fate of the many in the hands of the few" scenario.

Matt Hayden is an animal-loving expeditionary biologist who along with the quintessential sidekick Clancy Ryan, rush to the Californian town of Crater in a bid to rescue Matt's cousin. Crater is nestled in the foothills of Crater Mountain on the banks of Crater River which feeds into a lake called, you guessed it, Crater Lake. Apparently the people who named the region's landmarks were short on imagination.

Hoping to quickly organise a rescue party in Crater, Matt is frustrated to find that the town is hosting a Reptile Festival and the place has been taken over by snake wranglers, crocodile handlers and tourists. The sheriff's department are completely run off its feet just with crowd control and the prospect of putting together a search party looks slim.

It gets even slimmer when a sizable earth tremor hits Crater opening up large cracks in the earth and shattering some of the animal enclosures releasing hungry crocs and angry serpents amongst the crowd. Pandemonium and quite a bit of death breaks out at the festival closely followed by a mass evacuation from the town of Crater.

In the aftermath, Matt gets his group assembled but thanks to the recent events, numbers are down, as is the quality of manpower. Entering the crater they come up against a breed of hybrid apes that appears to be highly intelligent and are extremely territorial. Scarcely believing what they are witnessing, the rescue party barely escapes with their lives.

But this is merely the opening gambit as the apes have found their way out of the crater that held them captive for so many years. Their infiltration into the town of Crater starts fairly low-key and non-threatening but as the numbers swell, the full realisation begins to dawn just how dire their predicament has become. Then, when the apes start exhibiting their true nature Matt and the others realise it's not only the people stuck in Crater who are in danger.

Typical to all good action adventure thrillers the book kicks off with a flurry of activity to whet your appetite before taking a bit of time out to establish the credentials of the main characters. Gradually the pressure builds as the seemingly benign apes slowly become a more insidious presence and Crater becomes a more unstable place to inhabit.

Crater works up into an incredible confluence of events as hybrid apes face off against Matt, Clancy and a few remaining townsfolk. The pace is red hot the action is relentless and the characters are developed sufficiently to build a rapport without diverting too much attention from the story. All this and with a sobering message at the end that is particularly relevant to all of us.

Phoenix Connor has managed to make the unlikely plausible taking the advancements in genetic experimentation, which are progressing at such a mind-boggling rate that the hybrid apes could soon be reality. Although her characters go through the regular array of narrow escapes common to the genre, we are never taken over the line and forced to accept the impossible, with the possible exception of one or two motorcycle stunts.

For the most part I enjoyed the wild ride provided, but I did have a quibble or two. My biggest problem was, despite his ingenuity and quick-thinking, at no point did Matt Hayden ever make a concerted effort to get word out to the outside world. Armed with a satellite phone and any number of people fleeing the town, for some reason he chose not to call any of his friends in the scientific community for advice or to ask them to organise some sort of help. It felt as though their isolation was a tad too contrived.