 |
Charlotte Knight is relocating to Draakensky Windmill Estate to be nearer her boyfriend, Marc Sexton, but forces both mundane and otherworldly conspire to keep them apart. Marc's mother, Kelsey, disapproves of their impending engagement, warning him that "marrying an outsider" to the Finnwolf clan would betray their bloodline. Marc, to his great shame, has been keeping a number of secrets from Charlotte, including the fact that long ago the Sexton men made a blood covenant. Marc's secrets come spilling into the open when his protective wolf pendant mysteriously disappears. Meanwhile, the Ripper Pack stalks the property, and everything he loves is threatened.
In this, her latest novel set in the Draakensky universe, Cappa comes into her own. As ever, she writes in an enjoyably conversational style that avoids the generic prose (one-sentence paragraphs, sentence fragments) employed by many writers of suspense fiction, without sacrificing the story's pacing or momentum. Her narration feels reassuringly personal, as though one friend were speaking to another. One of the great joys of the Draakensky books is the author's lightly worn erudition, and here she gives us allusions both mythical and literary: Manannán Mac Lir, the goddess Minerva, and William Butler Yeats are all mentioned, and Yeats' poetry becomes a sort of leitmotif running through the story. However, the allusions never eclipse the book's main focus: the increasingly passionate (and often quite tender) romance between Marc and Charlotte. Cappa delivers on the promise of the book's title with wolf-on-wolf action and magic aplenty, but anglophiles and folklore enthusiasts will also find much to love here.