IF YOU are going to ask readers to believe in your story, lumbering your lead character with the unlikely name of Phoenix Lafayette isn't the best start.

Lafayette is a war photographer attached to a unit of US marines during the attack on Guam in the Second World War. But as his feet hit the beach, a voice from the future warns him to stop just in time for him to avoid running into shrapnel.

The voice belongs to a child prodigy turned sexy young thing, Cambridge professor Serena Freeman, who has knocked up a time machine thanks to a few speakers hooked up to her PC. Bill Gates never mentioned you could do that with the latest Windows upgrade.

Serena is a faintly dotty girl, overburdened with the need to trot through the author's self-justification for liking comic books, but she convinces Phoenix that for no particular reason he must complete a metaphorical 12 tasks of Hercules.

So off he goes, killing snakes that represent hydras and finding conveniently-placed knick-knacks to represent the hind of Ceryneia. Meanwhile, men in black reckon that Serena's PC upgrade is just the thing for British intelligence and if she has to be bumped off to accommodate Her Majesty, then so be it.

The battle sequences are Action Man standard, the 12 tasks read like a badly-grafted story construction and the characters don't ever convince that they are anything more than cyphers for the author's exposition. A deeply unsatisfying tome.

Updated: 08:54 Wednesday, May 19, 2004