REVIEWED BY CINDY
TITLE: The Wolf at His Door
SERIES: Book One of The Runes Trilogy
AUTHOR: Adrian Lilly
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 348 Pages
Blurb:
Ilene Rune has lived with a secret for 21 years that threatens to destroy her marriage, her life, and all of humanity. But how can she tell her son, Alec, that his new boyfriend, Jared, may be part of that secret?
Investigating a brutal murder, Detective Lance Herald enters a dark world of fairy tales and fantasy—that shakes his belief in what is possible and imagined.
Lucy Rune cannot fathom what happened the night one brother was slaughtered and the other critically wounded—but she does know, her boyfriend, Rene, who was also attacked is changing.
Geraldine Bloom, Alec’s grandmother, has the gift of foresight, and has waited for years for the evil that wants her grandson to come for him.
Alec Rune wakes from a coma to learn his twin brother has been murdered—and that he is the only witness. But he remembers nothing of the night.
Review:
I love shifter stories more than any other and when I read the blurb for this I was completely intrigued. However, I discovered that not only can you not judge a book by it’s cover, but you can’t judge it by it’s blurb either.
I wanted to love this story. Alec should have grabbed my heart as he deals with the hand he’s been dealt. The whole Rune family seems to be curse with some sort of horrific bad luck. But Alec is too busy scoffing at anything he doesn’t want to deal with and looking to get laid to generate any kind of sympathy from me.
Jared should have been the captivating center-point for all the questions that Alec should have been asking, but he just came across as odd without any real mystery about him.
The action, once it gets started just goes on fast and furious in the story and that’s sort of the problem. It’s all so frantic that it’s jarring and what should just pull you along in the story seems to drag you over speed bumps. Everything happens way too fast, with no time for anticipation to build. This is usually an issue that happens in much shorter novels, not in one that’s 348 pages.
I couldn’t connect with a single character in this story. None of them were sympathetic enough to grab my heart and honestly there wasn’t enough detail about them and how everything was making them feel to make me like them.
I don’t understand Alec’s grandmother’s determination to sit back and accept her fate because she saw it coming or her reluctance to do more to save her grandsons from the horror that was coming for them. The same goes for Alec’s mother.
The sister, Lucy, was perhaps the more animated character but her refusal to see the truth about her fiancé didn’t make any sense to me either.
Most of the time I felt like I was being hit over the head with too many details that are obviously meant to lead us into the sequel, like the rune stone for instance, and it felt like this story was rushed through just to get us to the next.
In my opinion, the author should have slowed down and concentrated on this story before worrying about moving on to the next.
Rating: 
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