Reviews

Wolf Tracks by David Case

jaz's review

dark fast-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

This is one of those books that I need to remember was written a while ago and has some dated ideas. The overall mystery is extremely straightforward. Honestly the biggest  interest going for it was how long will these two cops waffle over the idea about a werewolf existing. (It takes about half the book for them to go with it.)

One of the themes in the book was emasculation of men, but I'm not sure what it even was trying to say about it. Literally all the women were badly written, constantly viewed as sex objects, even the murdered women. There was a "crazy establishment-hating feminist", but actually was only doing it because everyone else was doing it? She also happened to hate wearing clothes. Cool. A social-climbing obsessed wife, a battered housewife, a prostitute, a female cop who was competent, but immediately died 2 paragraphs in.  All of them were there to support the male characters and a good chunk of them were just there to emasculate or annoy the men.

The two lead characters didn't have distinct enough personalities besides cop who believes in werewolves and cop who doesn't believe in werewolves.

There was some interesting set up of how lycanthropy works in this book's universe, but it didn't get expanded very much. I was hoping for something either more schlocky or even engrossing, but it was just dry over all.