Cary J. Griffith

Wolf Kill is the first in what may be an interesting mystery series. I like the setup: a Forest Service wolf expert solves crimes. In Wolf Kill, Sam Rivers goes home to northern Minnesota after he learns his father died. His father had been an abusive man and Sam fled years ago and changed his name. He kept in touch with his mother but she died a few years earlier. He went home to get something she’d left for him.

Wolf Kill is one of those mysteries where we all know who the bad guys are and just have to wait and hope is it their card out in the end. In this case, Sam’s father is actually not dead. Someone else was murdered in his place so he could escape indictment for multiple embezzlement charges and also cash in on his own life insurance. All his co-conspirators are known. So the only suspense is if and when Sam will figure things out.

Wolf Kill suffers from too much information. We know the conspiracy. We know the conspirators. We know how the Sheriff was pressured. We just know too much. The one thing that is hidden is the particulars of Sam’s leaving and that’s not enough to sustain a story. I may have rated this too high because I love books about Minnesota and am familiar with the peat bogs and the Northwoods. A little state chauvinism. However, I think a second in the series will probably be better. Sometimes, the first book or the series pilot is too much about explaining the characters, the who, why, and what of the situation and gets clunky. That is what this feels like, setting the stage for better books.

Wolf Kill will be released on June 15th. I received an ARC from the publisher through Shelf Awareness.

Wolf Kill at Adventure Publications | Scribd
Cary. J. Griffith author site… (meer)

I received this book for free in a first reads giveaway.

This book started off a little slow for me. A lot of characters were introduced in a short time. There is a group of bad guys, and it was hard for me to keep them straight.

After awhile, the story really picked up for me. I liked the hero, Sam. Coming home after 20 years away. I really liked that he worked with the wolves, and I would have liked to learn even more about them, and conservation issues.

By the end of the book, I was racing through the chapters. It was an exciting finish. Even though the reader pretty much knows how the book will end, it is still very compelling.… (meer)

Both the survival stories in this book are interesting on their own, but the writing, especially when the author is trying to put himself in the heads of his two protagonists, is sometimes clumsy and often repetitive (the descriptions of Dan Stephen's concussion were particularly overwrought, especially with three of them in the same paragraph. His head hurts; I get it).

The choice to use present tense to tell the stories feels forced, and doesn't serve the timeline very well. Speaking of timelines, Griffith begins the book with a prologue describing a harrowing experience shared by both the main characters: crossing a bog. Then he backs up in the chronology of both stories and goes through the preparation for and initial stages of the men's journeys into the wild. He alternates between the two timelines, which is a little disorienting at first. When he finally gets to the bog sequences, he essentially repeats what he's already told us in the prologue - letting the air out of the story just when the tension should be ramping up. (Griffith does a little better in the latter part of the book with the more nuts-and-bolts description of the rescue effort. It's when he's trying to be "writerly" that he goes off the rails.)

There are some peculiar word choices here and there, and some sloppy errors (for example, the outdoor equipment store is sometimes properly called REI, but more often appears in the book as "rei"). These things should have been caught by an editor.

… (meer)