Reviewed by Sarina
TITLE: Cry Wolf
SERIES: Underwood District #1
AUTHOR: Greta Stone
PUBLISHER: Skeleton Key Publishing
LENGTH: 409 pages
RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2017
BLURB:
Peter is a kitsune. Chaos follows him wherever he goes. Good intentions, bad intentions—it doesn’t matter. Even mimicking the howl of a friend he hasn’t seen in over a decade turns out to have disastrous consequences.
The wolf doesn’t have a name. For now, he goes by Luca. He has no past, and as an escaped slave, if he can’t stay hidden in the shadows, he’ll have no future. When someone steals his howl, he’s drawn to investigate, and ends up saddled with a mouthy fox who insists they used to be friends once upon a time.
Petty problems and a dubious reunion are pushed aside the longer they’re stranded together. The Underwood is a dangerous place.
They have two choices: work together or die.
Join Greta Stone in a dark paranormal MM romance retelling of Aesop’s fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and David P. Mannix’s classic novel, The Fox and the Hound.
REVIEW:
Way back when, I read the two part short story that predated this novel and I loved it so when I found out the author had seriously expanded it, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it! I have to say, as much as I enjoyed the original story, this was both just as good while simultaneously it was so much better! What the author has done here is a blending of classic fairytales, stuff that most everyone should recognize in one form or another, and various other mythologies but they were all so seamlessly integrated together it was hard to believe they’d never all been together in the same world to begin with. Here there be monsters and they are both unapologetic about what they are and absolutely perfect in both the darkness they don’t try to hide and the humanity they can’t help but show.
The two main characters, Peter and Luca, were really complex in all the best ways; one of my favorite things about this was getting to unravel the mystery they each presented over the course of the book. Honestly, there are things I’ll probably never figure out or get to learn about either of them but that just made them both more appealing to me. On the surface Peter is the ultimate trickster while Luca is the bad boy every mother despairs of their child bringing home. Their history together is complicated and gets only more so as the book progresses; this certainly isn’t helped by the fact that Luca has completely forgotten his past or the fact that he’s being hunted.
The story itself encompasses several months of time but there are some time skips in the middle to move progress along; I usually don’t care for time skips but these didn’t take anything away from either the character development or the overall story so I was completely fine with them. By the end of the book, both Peter and Luca had gone through some fairly hefty changes and were so much better for it; there’s also so much more left to explore and I’m totally excited for that!
This was just fantastic; the story was so unique and I loved when I found another fairytale reference just kind of slipped in there. There were some minor editing issues in the book but nothing that was overly distracting and I easily ignored them in favor of the story itself. If you’re looking for a book with complex characters with a unique and intriguing story, I’d really recommend you give this one a try!
RATING: 
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