True Wolf by Paige Tyler Series: STAT #3
Published by Sourcebooks on 22nd March 2022
Pages: 312
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Nuclear weapons have been stolen from the Air Force, and the race is on for the STAT Team to track down the supernatural terrorists to blame. The only lead they have to the missing nukes are two people they never expected to see again—Brielle, the mysterious supernatural who possesses talents no one understands, and her brother, who can't seem to go five minutes without getting into trouble.
As they begin to work together, STAT werewolf Caleb Lynch finds himself inexplicably drawn to Brielle, who doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with him...
I do sometimes think that the further I delve into Paige Tyler’s Werewolf/STAT universe, the more confused I get with her ever-expanding cast of supernaturals that go beyond the werewolves. But it is this very element of her series that is now propelling the plot and its momentum forward, even as the core romance and pairing principle stays the same.
Each book breaks down Tyler’s supernatural verse into facets that I loved learning about and ‘True Wolf’, in similar fashion, has a lot of things going on as Tyler reaches further into the James Bondesque-type save-the-world-type plots where only a select few work to prevent a disaster with everyone being none the wiser. It’s a fine line to tread, really, keeping the readers’s suspension of disbelief up while making it plausibly believable as each werewolf falls inexplicably hard for his one true soulmate (a.k.a. instalove, werewolf-style).
Caleb/Brielle wasn’t a pairing I particularly liked or disliked and my neutrality perhaps, went a ways in leading me to put the book down and take it up many times over the past month–the busy holiday period notwithstanding. Yet these books are very much team-based as well, and the sheer number of characters coming through felt very much like a distraction at best and my inability to keep up with the whole crew–despite having read their books in the past few years–did make it less enjoyable than I thought it would be.
In all, it felt like a mixed bag here: ‘True Wolf’s pacing was good, but a more focused (and slightly more pared-down?) story would have perhaps smoothened the whole read.
