Lincoln Child has already shown his skills in the “sense of place” adventure genre with the likes of “Deep Storm” (the ocean floor), “Terminal Freeze” (the Alaskan tundra) and “The Third Gate” (the swamps of northeast Africa), and he does it again with “Full Wolf Moon” (May, hardcover), set in New York’s Adirondack Mountains and the surrounding woods. His enigmalogist lead character, Jeremy Logan, has been somewhat slow to develop, but that changes here in a more personal yarn.
“Full Wolf Moon” is ideal for people who like to travel to places through literature but are timid about actually going there. Child paints the Adirondacks as a place where the thick trees turn day into night, where the roads become cracked and pitted as they get more remote, where some woods off the beaten path have never been touched by a human, and where the small population centers harbor long-held suspicions of their neighbors. (In an author’s note at the end, Child admits that he took liberties with the real place, but this won’t bother you unless you’ve been there and are looking for connections.)
Although Logan has conversations with folks such as his old forest ranger friend Jessup and his new woodsman/poet pal Albright, a lot of the book takes place inside his head, allowing the reader to feel a bond with him. As Logan thinks on page 57:
It was odd. His job as an enigmalogist had taken him to far more remote places in the past – Alaska’s Federal Wildlife Zone, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle; the vast swampy wasteland south of Egypt known as the Suud – and yet none of these had filled him with the kind of vague anxiety that he felt now.
Logan is staying at an artists’ retreat, finishing up a monograph (his day job is as a history teacher at Yale), and this serves as a safe home base from which he ventures out to the surrounding small towns and frightening forest.
Further emphasizing “Full Wolf Moon’s” removal from the beaten path is the mysterious Blakeney compound that’s practically hidden in the thick forest. At first blush, they call to mind the inbred Peacock family from the infamous “X-Files” episode “Home.” On his first visit, Logan is greeted with the barrel of a shotgun. The Blakeney clan has been on the land for so long that New York hasn’t even tried to assess their land and levy property taxes; if even the state is scared, you know this family isn’t to be taken lightly.
The author delivers various other suspects and red herrings in this murder mystery, as a few hikers have been mauled. It’s probably not much of a spoiler to reveal that this is a werewolf novel, although in the fashion we’ve come to expect from Child (and his writing partner Douglas Preston), there’s enough engaging pseudo-science poured on top of the lore to make one mull the possibilities. I find it amusing that Child borrows (on purpose or coincidentally, I don’t know) the idea from the “Buffy”-verse that a werewolf is susceptible to the full moon for three days – including the days before and after the true full moon. Also amusing is his nod to the creature from “Relic,” as victims-to-be notice a “goatish” odor before being attacked.
Clocking in at a mere 241 pages, “Full Wolf Moon” still gives readers their “money’s worth,” although there’s a danger that you’ll polish it off in just a couple sittings and be hungry for the next Child novel. Many chapters end on such intriguing notes that it takes extreme willpower to not keep going into the next brisk chapter. While not a long novel – and not wholly original with its werewolf tale – it seems like this is a pivotal novel for Logan, and I think some supporting players might turn up later. The thing you’ll remember most, though, are those dark and scary Adirondack woods.