Errata: "the Jeremy Kite incidence" I think the author means 'incident'. "He couldn’t figure it out." Should be ‘She couldn’t figure it out’
I am avowedly not into werewolf or vampire stories for the most part because they're far too cookie-cutter: each one is a clichéd clone of the last, especially if it's a YA story (which this blessedly is not). This particular one promised to be different and thankfully it started out quite differently, and I liked it very much, but the more I read, the less I liked it because it was so trudging and inauthentic, and although the author took a commendably different tack with the werewolf part of the story - which is something I advocate authors to do, but so rarely see - she fell down on the realism with regard to the FBI investigation over missing children.
One immediate problem with this narrative is that while it is thankfully not in first person, it is told alternatingly from the perspectives of the main two characters, which means tediously going over the same ground we already covered, but from the other protagonist's perspective. That became an irritant in short order, and led to me quickly skipping portions of the text where this happened.
One sad trope the author didn't skip I'm sorry to say, was the haunted backstory that I've seen done to death far too many times and of which I am so bored. Are there no detectives who don't have a haunted past? No PI's? No FBI agents? No CIA officers? LOL! Not in the fictional world there are not, and it is such a tired trope. FBI agent Eleri is a woman whose lost sister has haunted her for years (not literally). Donovan is a werewolf. Both work for the FBI division of Nightshade, although they may as well be regular FBI agents for all the part that 'nightshade' actually plays in this story.
Eleri is the experienced agent and she plays mentor to Donovan, who is a new recruit who was previously a medical examiner, so the pair are like Fox and Mulder from X-Files with genders reversed. Other than that, this isn't remotely like X-Files. It's simply a missing children story, so why nightshade division needed to be involved is a mystery. That said, I read only fifty percent of this before giving up on it, so I may have missed something more supernatural toward the end.
At one point they locate a dead body in a shallow grave and Eleri supposedly helps excavate the body, but I seriously doubt that an FBI field agent would be on her knees digging up a body when an expert forensic team is there. She would just get in the way and mess up stuff. I may be wrong - I'm not an FBI expert, but it just seemed off base to me. There were times reading this when it felt like the author was putting shit into the story just to show off how much research she'd done rather than getting on with the story. I don't appreciate it when authors do that. If you feel like some things need to be in there, then there are much more subtle ways of doing it than were exhibited here.
The story has it that children are going missing and it's connected to a religious cult called The Children of God, situated in a remote part of Texas, so the agents head down there and then hit such an unrealistic series of coincidences that it became too much. On top of that, there was a lethargy about raiding the cult's camp that was utterly insupportable. That's why I quit reading in the end. I guess the author did it to have a big showdown at the end, but it came off as just plain stupid.
So, first absurd coincidence is that while out reconnoitering the cult's compound as his werewolf self, by accident, Donovan encounters a kid called Joshua who has escaped the compound. He's bleeding badly from a wound apparently inflicted with the edge of a shovel, and he has a broken arm and bruises, and Donovan and Eleri take him to a hospital, but despite the kid's descriptions of the brutal life there, do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to sleep the night.
Second, and again purely by accident, they find a girl also from the camp, and who tells the same kind of stories about it that Joshua has told them. This girl is identified as one of the missing girls, and her story corroborates everything Joshua has already told them. She has also been badly treated. Do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to eat.
Next, and again purely by coincidence, they encounter a truck driver who has picked up one or two kids from the camp and helped them out. He corroborates a story about a girl from the camp who sought medical help at a hospital, and later was killed in the camp, according to Joshua. Do they raid the place? Hell no! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about the endless Texas heat. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit and piss-poor writing. This is thoroughly unrealistic and just stupid. It really turned me off the story and that's when I quit reading. It was too much.
I liked that Eleri's power was that she would dream true things and this helped the investigation, but there were still issues with this: in that she wasn't much more aggressive in finding her missing sister who she dreamed of often. There was a poor excuse made for why she didn't, but given that this supposedly haunted her for years, it made no sense that she hadn't pursued it when younger. I think that the young Eleri's quest to rescue her sister would have made a better story than this one turned out to be.
The werewolf part of the story I liked for the most part, but there were problems even with that. For example when he's investigating the compound, the author has Donovan's wolf sprint at over 30 mph for an hour, which isn't possible. Wolves can reach some 30 mph, but only in short bursts, and from the pseudo-scientific descriptions that are given, Donovan's change from human to wolf is a physical thing involving readjustment of his bones, which makes it seem like, rather than become a wolf, he's really a worst of both worlds wolf-human hybrid, and therefore he'd be hampered by his change, not enhanced by it. And no explanation is given for why two species as disparate as a dog and a human, would even remotely have a hybrid.
It's supposed to be through mutations, but given that canines and humans have not shared a common ancestor for well over forty million years, there's nothing to support even a fictional attempt to pretend there's any science involved in the hybrid. Plus, if two organisms can mate and successfully produce viable offpring, they're the same species, so this hybrid idea is nonsensical unless you keep it purely in the supernatural realm. You can't turn pure fiction into science. The idiot creationists learned that a good while back.
At one point the author has Donovan say, of his enhanced sense of smell, "I have a larger nasal cavity inside my head than most straight-up humans." He's trying to suggest this is why his sense of smell works so much better than most, but that's not actually how it works - not all of it. Dogs have a unique organ in the base of the nose called Jacobson's organ, for example, that humans do not have - or anything like it. They also have maybe as many as 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose whereas humans have some six million, so yes, having a large area for detecting smells is important, but it would be larger than any human has, and it's no good unless you have the brainpower to process that information.
Dogs devote 40 times more brainpower to processing smells than do humans. All of this ultimately goes back to your genetic complement. The olfactory receptor part of the vertebrate genome is the largest genome superfamily, signifying how important it is to us, and whereas humans have around 900 'smelling genes', rodents have almost twice that many. We have a lot that are broken and useless because they were no longer critical to our survival, so there was no evolutionary benefit to maintaining them, whereas dogs have a stunningly impressive ability to smell tiny concentrations of odor, so there's no doubt they have more functional genes in this department than we do. None of this is even mentioned in Donovan's 'explanation'. I felt more could have been done, or else the author needs to abandon any attempt to pretend there's any sort of rational scientific basis behind Donovan being a werewolf and just leave it in the supernatural.
As it was, I could have let those things slide, but the trudging and lethargic pace of the investigation, which led to me skipping parts of the narrative just to get past those bits, together with the absurd coincidences and lucky breaks, the obsession with inner monologues, with the Texas heat, and with dining and sleeping arrangements, and the complete lack of anyone's interest in raiding a cultist camp that was clearly abducting and abusing children and women was so ridiculous that I couldn't stand to read any more of this. I'm done with this series and with this author.