African Adventure - Willard Price

When I was a child, this was the first book I read in the series, borrowed from the school library, and it remained my favourite. Currently returning from my own African safari in Kenya, the opening scene with the Hunt brothers listening to the nightly orchestra of the African jungle and having their father identify each 'instrument', was highly resonant. After tracking a man-eating leopard, the Hunts' new adventure starts with a mystery when the beast's footprints take on a supernatural aspect. Along with capturing wild animals for zoos, they must now watch out for a member of the secret Leopard Society who has pledged to murder them. The conflict between the civilised influence of the west and the primitive superstitions of the Africans comes into play here.

In spite of the assassination subplot, this book is relatively light in tone, introducing the character of Colonel Bigg as the fraudulent great white hunter who provides much of the slapstick. As the boys go about capturing leopards, hippos, baboons, hyenas, buffalo, and giraffes, the animals are introduced with lots of interesting facts, as usual, many of which are exaggerated or derived from unreliable eyewitness accounts. For instance, at one point the so-called animal expert John Hunt claims that the hippo catches fish by opening its mouth on the riverbed, despite asserting that hippos are herbivores a few pages earlier. He also incorrectly refers to baboons as apes. The book is fun, fast paced and an exciting change of setting from the Pacific based earlier adventures. 

Rating: 4/5