I see a full moon rising

Full Wolf Moon

Lincoln Child

 

Publisher: Doubleday

Pub Date: May 16, 2017

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

 

Lincoln Child, along with his partner in crime Douglas Preston, has a pretty good gig going for them. They specialize in the not-so-supernatural thriller. In most cases , and especially with the Pendergrast series, this involves a mystery of seemingly supernatural origins but ends up being something from the natural, albeit the very imaginative and slightly farfetched natural. These Scooby-doo books, as I irrelevantly like to call them, are fun to read but I tend to go more for the supernatural scare rather than the manufactured natural one. However they are great summer reads or, on the other side of the seasons, fireside reads.

When Lincoln Child is writing solo, he likes to keep a good thing going. His protagonist is Jeremy Logan who calls himself a enigmalogist which is "an investigator who specializes in analyzing unnatural phenomena with no obvious scientific or rational explanation." As one may surmise from the title of this fifth installment of the Logan series, Full Wolf Moon is centered on the theme of lycanthropy. In the Adirondack Mountains, two hikers has been found dead with their corpses ripped apart, both having happened on different full moons. Logan is attending an artist and scholar retreat when his college friend who is now a ranger in the area asks him to investigate the deaths. The official explanation is a rogue bear or wolf, but the timing of the killings suggest another explanation and the strange seclusive family that lives in the woods seem to be the town residents' favorite suspect.

While Full Wolf Moon has a good sense of suspense and scares , it is more mystery and science fiction then horror and certainly not supernatural. As with Child's other books, there will be an explanation. Getting there is where the fun is . Child brings together some interesting science into the story that I suspect carries a good mix of fact and fiction. I think I prefer Child solo as compared to the Pendergrast series Preston & Child are known for. Mostly because Jeremy Logan is more accessible . He seem to be the professor next door type while Pendergrast is fairly foreboding. The pace and formula though is pretty much the same. These are light reads. This particular book is fairly predictable and feeds you a good amount of red herrings before the final reveal. I would recommend this more for the mystery fan than the horror aficionado. It may not take you into any new territory but if you read it you probably know what to expect and won't be disappointed.