Kanaan & Tilney: The Case of the Man Eater

By Jenna Rose and Katey Hawthorne

Publisher: Loose Id

Pairing: Bisexual M/Demisexual Biromantic M

Series: Kanaan & Tilney Investigations (http://kanaanandtilneyinvestigations.com/) #2

Blurb:

Wolf-Beast and ex-cop Lowell Kanaan recently brought his boyfriend, Elementalist and mystery author John Tilney, into the PI business with him. They’ve been solving cases for Boston’s varied praeternatural communities ever since. So when a young Terran feels that the brutal murder of his Beast boyfriend isn’t being treated seriously enough by the police, he brings the case to Kanaan & Tilney for a second opinion.

Similarly defiled corpses pop up around Boston as they race to find the killer. All the victims are packless Beasts, like Lowell, and the vicious nature of the killings stir up old prejudices in the praeternatural community, Beast and otherwise. Throw a personal vendetta and some ugly family history for Lowell in the mix, and the trails are as muddy as ever.

This case will test Kanaan & Tilney’s strength, both as a PI team and a couple. It’ll take all they have to keep each other alive—and stop a serial killer.

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Thanks so much for hosting us today, LB crew. Today we’re here to talk about our new release, the second Kanaan & Tilney Investigation, The Case of the Man Eater. These books focus on the “praeternatural” community in Boston, MA–Jenna’s hometown. There are five main factions of “praeternaturals” in the K&T world: Beasts, Elementalists, Terrans, Necromorphs, and Psychogenics, all with different paranormal powers. Since The Case of the Man Eater delves deep into the Beast faction, we’re gonna talk about…

“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”

In our books, packs are important in a Beast’s life. Made up of related and unrelated Beasts of the same animal type, packs are essentially an extended family. They are like a built-in support systems, ensuring that no member is ever on their own. If someone from the pack needs help of any kind, the others are there to give it. No pack is perfect, however, and they all suffer from their own political and personal disagreements. It’s like an extended family in that way too.

Packs don’t all live together, but they do have a centrally located meeting center. These places provide healthcare, daycare, education, summer programs, and jobs for any pack member to make use of. They even operate as an emergency or homeless shelter for those in need. All pack members donate time and/or resources to their community center.

So, to make an incredibly long story short (sorry, we ramble), since Lowell is a packless wolf and the book focuses on Beasts in general, we thought it would be fun to talk a bit about some of the Beast packs found in Boston.

The only wolf pack in Boston, Shamal descended from a pack of Macedonian war-wolves who followed Alexander the Great all the way through his campaigns in Afghanistan and India. After Alexander’s death, they followed Ptolemy to Egypt, where over a century or two they interbred with a local jackal clan and took a new name. They served as guardians to the Ptolemaic holdings in Egypt, and then into the Roman period. Throughout, this duty included guarding the Library of Alexandria… which explains why once it burned to the ground on their watch, they were blamed and shamed. They didn’t take the name Shamal until much later, upon emigration to the US in the 1950s during times of extreme unrest in Egypt.

The Shamal Community Center is located in Downtown Boston. It is currently led by Hassan Kanaan-Shamal. Some of them have shown up in the books, others have yet to, but they’re all awesome.

The Draenog pack came to America from Wales in the late 1700s. They settled in Pennsylvania first where they worked predominantly as coal miners and remained there until the early 1850s when the steep drop in the demand for anthracite coal forced them to close down their mines. They sold their land to the government and, unable to agree on what to do from there, the pack split with half going out west to seek their fortune and the rest going east hoping that the bigger cities would provide some stability. The east-bound pack eventually settled in Boston which was seeing a manufacturing boom and had a wealth of jobs to offer for those in search of work.

The Draenog Community Association is located in Back Bay. It is currently led by Mary Margaret Williams-Draenog.

The oldest pack in Boston, the Makwa pack has lived in the area since before America was colonized. Originally comprised entirely of the Algonquian people, it has since grown to include Beasts who have moved or immigrated to the area. As the city grew up around them, the Makwa refused to leave, becoming something of an urban bear population and, more often than not, the reason behind any supposed bear sightings within the area. The Makwa are very proud of their heritage and often brag of their status as the oldest pack in Boston.

The Makwa Public Center is located in the North End. It is currently led by Amy Whitefeather-Makwa.

One of three raccoon packs within the city limits, Sredl is fairly young compared to many other packs. It got its start in the mid-1940s when an Italian-American Beast returned from the front with a Croatian, rabbit Beast. Though both men were very much in love and there was no law disallowing relationships between different types of Beasts, their relationship was not well-received by the pack. Sensing the pack would never accept them, the Italian-American voluntarily left. He was swiftly followed and joined by his family. The new pack that formed took the Croatian’s last name–Sredl–as their pack name as a gesture of solidarity.

The Sredl Community Center is located in the North End. It is currently led by Gio Moretti-Sredl.

The Kriki claim that their originating clan came over long before the Mayflower, when Vikings visited North America’s northeast coast as early as the 11th century CE. Whether they merged with an extant American flock before European colonization or not is unknown–even they have over a dozen different stories about it and none of them agree–but they’ve certainly snowballed as the years rolled onward and the city of Boston expanded with them. They claim a presence in many famous moments in Boston history: from Boston Tea Party, when they helped scatter British goods in the harbor to several tense games in Fenway where they crapped on the caps of literally the entire batting line up for the New York Yankees.

The Kriki Neighborhood Campus is located in Charlestown. It is currently led by Joe Sullivan-Kriki.

During the campaigns of Cromwell and his Roundheads in the mid 1600s in Ireland, plenty of native beast packs suffered with their countrymen. The Ronan seal-shifter colony of West Cork was split in two when nearly half of them, men, women, and children, were evicted from their homes and shipped to Barbados as indentured servants. Those who escaped did so only by shifting.

In the mid-1800s, while most of the country was in the throes of the potato famine, the Ronan herd managed to mostly keep their fishermen’s way of life. But the economic strife and punishing government situations eventually bled them dry enough that nearly all of them emigrated to Boston… in the middle of the American Civil War. Any man old enough to fight was handed a rifle when barely off the boat.

Despite these hardships, both branches of the clan survive and intermix regularly to this day–largely thanks to Maggie O’Sullivan-Ronan, a matron of the early 1900s who renewed ties between the Caribbean-Irish and North American-Irish Ronan. The American branch is fiercely proud, and fiercely South Boston Irish.

The Ronan Colony Center is located in South Boston. It is currently led by Sean O’Leary-Ronan.