Reviewed by Jess
TITLE: Raised by Wolves
SERIES: Underdogs #8
AUTHOR: Geonn Cannon
PUBLISHER: Supposed Crimes
LENGTH: 221 pages
RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2019
BLURB:
The wolf has returned.
Ari is reluctant when she’s summoned to Seattle’s Millionaire’s Row by Vivian Burroughs, given their history with rich clients, but the money is too good to refuse. Vivian reveals that she’s dying, and fears one of her four children might attempt to steal a valuable tapestry hanging in her house. She plans to lock the room where it hangs and leave the key with Ari until the will is read. The job seems simple enough until the day arrives and the room is unlocked to reveal the tapestry has vanished. Now Ari has to stay on the case to figure out not only which of the heirs is responsible for taking the artwork, but how they managed to get it out of a locked room.
With time running out before all her suspects leave town, Ari has to figure out who took the priceless tapestry and how they did it, while also facing an outside force which may do the unthinkable and come between her and Dale.
REVIEW:
This is the eighth book in Geonn Cannon’s urban fantasy/mystery/romance series, “Underdogs,” starring private detective (and werewolf) Ariadne Willow and her girlfriend, Dale Frye. While the series has been cooking for years, the characters and plots are far from stale, and it was a joy to revisit them once more in this excellent locked-room mystery. This is one of my favorite stories so far!
In the last book, Kennel Club, Ari was in prison after being falsely accused, where she was forced to suppress her wolf so her canidae identity wasn’t revealed. She’s still getting used to the change again, which is making her self-conscious about her interactions with Dale. As the two get back to their normal lives, the begin untangling two new mysteries. One is a big case (and big paycheck) offered by terminally ill heiress Vivian Burroughs. Vivian is planning to end her life peacefully after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, so she’s getting all her affairs in order, including the safekeeping of a priceless piece of Seattle history, a tapestry called The Crossing-Over Place. After she passes, Ari is left guarding the tapestry from the greedy hands of Vivian’s four adult children—and dealing with the bombshell that goes off when the tapestry goes missing.
The second mystery involves an archaic volume of texts that details the mythology of werewolves, written by a German werewolf hunter who wanted to eradicate the species. When a shady professor contacts Ari and Dale about releasing the texts to the public, Dale decides to read them for herself—but doesn’t realize they place a toxic, dangerous curse on whoever looks at them. Ari has to deal with both the Burroughs mystery and the alarming changes in Dale, and neither seem to have easy solutions.
There is so much good stuff going on in this book that I have to divide it into parts, starting with the Burroughs mystery. I was immediately invested in the toxic dynamics of the Burroughs family from the moment we met them during their mother’s memorial service. They remind me a lot of the Crain family from Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House—they used to be close, but circumstances and parental mistakes have broken them apart, and now they can barely be in the same room together. Eleanor, the uptight oldest daughter, scoffs at her family’s wealth and strives to be her own person. The twins, Elizabeth and Evelyn, lead separate lives and have separate values. And the baby, Preston, is unemployed and still living on handouts from Mom, despite his tumultuous relationship with her.
The person who ties them all together, Vivian, is unfortunately deceased before we even meet the children, so we have to figure out the complexities of what it means to be a Burroughs child through their strained interactions and various lies and accusations flung at one another. It is easy to forget that this book isn’t even really about them because they make for such an interesting story. They make us invested in the mystery from the start.
Aside from the mystery is the romance, which is always strong in this series. In my ranking of favorite F/F series couples, Ari and Dale come close to the top of my list. They’re perfect together in every way. They have that vibe of a long-term couple who can be snarky and goofy with each other one minute and be totally in-sync in a crisis the next. Their love scenes are always warm, sensual, and intimate. And they are always communicating and trying to be their best for each other, even if they both give into some of their more curious and reckless impulses while on a case.
In this story, they both have slightly separate arcs that come together at the end, so we don’t get quite as much shipping time as we do in previous books. I always like it when Dale has an opportunity to work on something independently, since I enjoy her as a character almost as much as I enjoy Ari. Without giving too much away, I’ll reveal that the twist that comes around the halfway mark will completely break your heart. But as always, Cannon writes happy endings for his characters, and Ari and Dale have been through much, much worse.
I’m forever a Geonn Cannon stan, and this is another excellent book. Though this is the eighth book in the series, it can be read mostly as a standalone mystery. I admit that I love the series, but I read the books out of order, and they still make sense—as long as you start with the first book, Underdogs. The mystery in this book is intriguing, the romance rips our hearts out and puts them back together again, and it fits nicely within the series mythology and themes. I highly recommend this book—and, if you’re looking for a summer binge read, the “Underdogs” series as a whole.
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