Wolf at the Door

September 15, 2011

Just what you wanted: a werewolf spinoff to Davidson's wacky vampire series that offers serious sexy-heroine competition to Minnesota vamp queen Betsy Taylor.

Nobody says no to Michael Wyndham, the billionaire leader of the St. Paul Pack of werewolves—certainly not his cousin Rachael Velvela, a Cape Cod accountant who can't imagine swapping the grounds of Wyndham Manor, where she runs when the Change is upon her, for the fishy fragrance of 10,000 lakes. No matter, Michael gently demands: Rachael must pull up stakes and relocate indefinitely to St. Paul in order to keep a watchful eye on the queen of the vampires, around whom dark rumors have gathered. No sooner has Rachael settled in a Twin Cities rental owned by bakers Call Me Jim and Please Call Me Martha than she's swept off her feet by equally sexy accountant Edward Batley IV, whose roommates, cop-turned-vampire Gregory Schorr and his lover Boo Miller, aka Ghost, have inured him to some pretty strange life forms. Refusing to stage a banal epic struggle between werewolves and vampires, Davidson (Undead and Undermined, 2011, etc.) instead presents a throwaway mystery—who's killing the small-business owners looking for accountants?—some smoking-hot sex and some unexpected girl-girl bonding between Rachael and Betsy, all set against a world in which "people in your building didn't care if you were dead as long as you didn't stick Canadian nickels in the dryers."

Is someone plundering the membership rolls of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce just to get Betsy's attention? Or is the real motive even more devious? Don't worry about it; just wait for Rachael's certain return.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)