Full Wolf Moon

Full Wolf Moon
by Lincoln Child
Recommended Ages: 14+

When Yale medieval history prof Jeremy Logan tries to take a break from his second career as an “enigmalogist” – explainer of the unexplained – he finds himself at an artists’ retreat in the Adirondacks, working on a scholarly monograph about heresy. Nevertheless, the pursuit of things that go bump in the night – or, in this case, things that howl at the full moon – comes to him, in the form of an old college chum who now works as a park ranger.

Randall Jessup suspects that the mauled victims found in the woods after the last couple of full moons are the doing of something with the intelligence of a man and the savagery of a wild animal. Logan isn’t quite so ready to sign onto the werewolf theory, but when his friend becomes the next victim, it gets harder to look away.

Risking getting kicked out of the quiet sanctuary of Cloudwater, Logan finds himself circling the edges of a police manhunt that may have something more than man out in front of it. Could the killer be a psychopathic killer who was recently discharged from a criminally insane ward into the very area of the murders? Could he have something to do with an inbred clan that lives behind a woven wall in the backwoods, and whom the locals suspect of having a hairy secret? Could it be related to a research station conducting secret animal experiments on the fringes of science? Or maybe all of the above?

Whatever the truth is, it will (naturally) put Logan and others in terrifying danger on a series of full-moon nights – because monographs aren’t written in a day, you know – amid the gorgeous scenery and, in the dark at least, unnerving quietness of upstate New York’s parkland. Secrets within secrets, moon sickness, paranoia, isolation and anger all do their part to make a stretch of forest road a deadly place to be while one guy, no stranger to being dismissed as a fringe maven, strives to reconcile the unbelievable with the undeniable, the fantastic with the real. It all cooks up into a rich stew of eeriness, weirdness, suspense, freakish terror, outlandish outlines and (more or less) believable details.

This is Book 5 of the Dr. Jeremy Logan series, coming after Deep Storm, Terminal Freeze, The Third Gate and The Forgotten Room. The author, not to be confused with Lee Child, is half of the "Preston & Child" writing duo, along with Douglas Preston. Together, they have written the 18-book Pendergast series and the five-book Gideon's Crew series, besides a handful of stand-alone books. By himself, Lincoln Child is also the author of Utopia (a.k.a. Lethal Velocity) and Death Match.