Liquid Silver Books, $5.95, ISBN 978-1-59578-474-2
Fantasy Romance, 2008

Poor Wade. His brother Beowulf got mated in Beowulf and Roxie so now he’s wondering when he’s going to find his own mate. As he puts it so eloquently:

So far none of the werewolf females had set off his mating urge, the one true sign that he had found his mate.

Wait, does the fact that that he’s not getting a chubby from the werewolf females means that it is a “true sign” that he has found his mate? Okay, I know what the author means, but still, the often awkward and stilted sentence patterns that plagued the previous works by this author that I’ve read are still present in abundance here. Why haven’t any of the author’s editors noticed and caught all that boo-boo?

Well, Wade’s dry spell is coming to an end. A chance visit by Taryn Davies to the Wulf’s Den – she is trying to sell some of her wines to the establishment – lets Wade know that she is his mate. He can smell her and apparently the scent lets him know in some way that she is the one for him. Alas, manhandling and attempting to shag her at the car park turn out to be not that good a way to romance his way into her pants, so Wade may have to exert a bit more effort than that. Meanwhile, poor Taryn will find herself stalked by a bad guy as her parentage and her mother’s mysterious death catch up with her. Fortunately, a tell-all journal, revealed at a convenient moment, will help shed some illumination into the mystery.

On the bright side, this book isn’t as amateurishly written as I feared – maybe the author is improving – but Ms Chenery could spend more time developing her scenes. For example, a more dramatic scene could be described in more detail compared to a more trivial scene of Taryn daydreaming about the sales of her wines. Varying the length of a scene also helps to convey a change in pace or momentum to the author and this will be most useful when it comes to building up a scene that will lead to a climactic moment.

It also doesn’t help that the author incorporates some of the most clichéd and overused plot devices in her suspense subplot, adding to the amateurish feel of the whole thing.

Taryn’s Wolf is one of the better works that I’ve read by this author, but unfortunately, that isn’t much of a compliment as this story is still a decidedly unpolished one. Still, I’d like to be optimistic and believe that the author is going somewhere and improving along the way.