Product Description - Amazon
Let the hunt begin . . .
When Simon Burns is
fired from his job without warning, he takes on the role of stay-at-home
dad for his three-year-old son. But his reluctance pushes his already
strained marriage to the limit. In the nestled playgrounds of the Upper
West Side, Simon harbors a simmering rage at his boss's betrayal.
Things take a turn when he meets a tight-knit trio of dads at the
playground. They are different from other men Simon has met, stronger
and more confident, more at ease with the darker side of life- and soon
Simon is lured into their mix. But after a guys' night out gets
frighteningly out of hand, Simon feels himself sliding into a new
nightmarish reality.
As he experiences disturbing
changes in his body and his perceptions, he starts to suspect that when
the guys welcomed him to their "pack", they were talking about much more
than male bonding . . .
Most enjoyable urban fantasy. This is my review for Amazon Vine:
This is a splendid urban fantasy set in New York: family life versus the
call of the wild. In this case the story of a father forced by
circumstance into the role of childminder, who encounters in a play park
a group of other fathers who fascinate him from the start. Simon is,
initially, a bit of a wimp; fired from his job as a advertising
executive. he flounces home to find that his wife will be happy to
continue working while he takes over the childcare. Even before this the
marriage is not going well and he readily enough falls under the spell
of Michael, the leader of the 'pack'. Invited out for an evening with
the boys he wakes the next morning to find himself stranded in New
Jersey with only nightmares to suggest what he may have been up to. He
finds himself with added strength, enhanced hearing, a highly enhanced
sex drive and a full blown taste for red meat, but it is a while before
he begins to accept what has happened to him. His wife Alison, initially
delighted with the change in him, comes to suspect not the truth, but
the worst.
There is a good deal of black humour here, and also
genuine feeling between Simon, Alison and their son Jeremy; the problems
of being a stay-at-home father are given a sympathetic airing.
All
this is great, but I did feel that Michael's motives were less than
clear; is it loneliness that makes him want to recruit against his
father's wishes, or is he just a megalomaniac in werewolf form? I also
felt that maybe Olivia became a fantasy too far, but we are talking
werewolves. The ending is rather rushed and I found it less than
convincing, although, if this is to be a series rather than a stand
alone fantasy, it does leave the field open. If so, I'd like to read the
next one.
MySwaps My TBR Now reading: Aftershock by Quintin Jardine