Magic/Paranormal

An unexpected partnership leads two wolves to reconsider everything they know...

Alpha werewolf Harley Grant isn't exactly comfortable with her inner wolf. Even though she's on a STAT Team where she can use her abilities because her teammates know about her, she refuses to do so, putting herself and sometimes them at risk.

Alpha werewolf Sawyer Bishop would give anything for his M16 Team to know about his inner wolf, but his teammates are mistrustful of anyone or anything with inhuman abilities. When he meets Harley on an overlapping case and realizes she's a fellow wolf, he's more than a little intrigued.

Now that STAT and MI6 have to team up to stop a crew of supernatural bad guys intent on causing a nuclear meltdown, Harley can no longer deny her wolf and Sawyer can no longer hide his. As they grow closer to resolving the case and grow closer to each other, they discover things aren't what they seem and revenge could cost them their lives.

‘Undercover Wolf’ starts off with a bang and takes off from the start, plunging you straight into the action as multiple agencies and their people start crossing wires over the bad guys. There’s the race to uncover more before the insidious roots lead to a point of no return, a race from exotic locale to another exotic locale to counter human/supernatural trafficking—all the typical ingredients of a suspense movie pumped full with characters whose abilities go beyond the normal moving around within covert circles doing covert things.

As a follow-up from her SWAT series, Paige Tyler’s STAT series is a bit more amped up…and a lot more reckless fun.

Within this larger framework, there’s the pairing of Harley Grant and Sawyer Bishop, 2 alphas who are immediately drawn to each other (thanks to Tyler’s theory of a werewolf finding his/her fabled soulmate) even though both of them suppress part of their true selves in various ways for varying reasons.

Sawyer exemplifies the werewolf who has yet to come out of the closet and it’s a dynamic that is definitely new, as the fear of judgement, or introducing a supernatural element to an established circle of colleagues or friends is certainly a daunting one. Paige Tyler goes down this route just a little, but it’s thankfully more than just the teenage spiel of ‘finding yourself and your identity’, but rather, a gentle, brief look as well as the notions of monstrosity and acceptance.

Non-stop action however, laterally drives the plot and keeps the pages turning rather than the lows and highs of character-introspection, so the one-true-pairing of Harley and Sawyer comes together without much of a hitch or angst. This, at its most basic, is this series’s defining trademark, and one that can get a little fatigued after finding its nth iteration in this story, as easy to read as it might be.

Tyler’s ever-expanding werewolf universe now includes a host of other creatures of supernatural abilities and I’m quite chuffed about reading about this widening and intriguing network of to-quite human beings (vampires are the stinky, dead-eyed ones here, nothing like the seductive bleached-whiteness and ethereal beauty found in the Twilight series).

It’s messy, bewildering at times and a little too convoluted too, but coming out of it, I guess what I’m really hoping to see going forward from here is for Tyler to move past the pairings of werewolf with human/another werewolf and to bend the more established lines she’d been going at for a while.