Hunter's Moon

Hunter's Moon is the kind of paranormal romance that grabs you with a high-concept setup and then earns it. Tony Giodone is a Mafia hitman in Chicago who takes a contract on a woman named Sue Quentin, and the contract goes wrong in the first chapter when she turns out to be a werewolf and bites him in self-defense. He is now also a werewolf. The handler who sent him is now the problem. The Sazi (the larger shifter community) want to know what to do with both of them.

Adams and Clamp write at a competent thriller pace and the world they build is more carefully thought out than the genre usually bothers with. The Sazi rules (the shifter species, the inheritance lines, the politics of the Council) take up just enough room to feel real without strangling the romance. The romance, the central question of whether Tony and Sue can ever trust each other given how they met, is handled with more honesty than the cover suggests.

Four stars. A clean entry to the long Sazi series that earns its reader through plot rather than premise. Recommended for paranormal romance readers who like their leads compromised at the start.