Full Wolf Moon

I like Lincoln Child. He went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnestoa. I lived in Northfield for several years. Never met Linc, but I still like him. He, with his writing partner, Douglas Preston, has turned out a prolific amount of pages over the years, namely the Pendergast series and the Gideon Crew novels. However, FULL WOLF MOON is the fifth in the Jeremy Logan series, which is Child's alone.

I enjoyed the rest of the novels in the series. The premise is always the same: Logan is a widowed professor and an “enigmalogist”–a guy who studies enigmas. Usually, Logan finds something bordering on the supernatural, and then he skulks around until he uncovers the truth of the matter (and truth is always stranger than fiction), and then there's a flurry of action at the end as the story comes to its climax. It's always page-turning good fun.

FULL WOLF MOON is no exception to this beat. Logan is at an artists' retreat in the Adirondacks to finish a monograph, but the deep forest has been plagued in recent months by strange, brutal killings, possibly done by a rogue bear? Maybe Bigfoot? As one would expect from the title, maybe it's a werewolf.

Although the story starts slowly, once it picks up, it clips along with a solid pace, as typical for Preston/Child novels. Child manages to paint a plausible scientific basis for hairy dog-men running through the forest and feeding on the flesh of the untainted (albeit, a bit of a stretch). Once you see how he sets up the sketchy science, if you let yourself buy into the theory, the rest of the book is a roller coaster that eventually comes to a satisfying conclusion.

FULL WOLF MOON is not breaking new ground in the Jeremy Logan series, and it suffers from a lack of character development, but it's a fun read, and I will be looking forward to the next one.