snow job

Cryptozoologist Morgan Carter is once again called into action, this time to investigate a murder. In Rhinelander, Wisconsin, an ice fisherman is accused of murder, but he insists that he didn’t kill anyone. He claims it was a hodag. The hodag is a creature known to that area, believed to have horns and spikes down its back and red eyes. But Morgan is certain that a hodag didn’t kill anyone, since it is a completely made-up creature. It was invented as a prank back in the late 1800s.

When Morgan isn’t off chasing cryptids, she is at home with her bookshop, and it was her shop employee Rita who came to her for help. Her nephew Andy is the one who found the dead man in the snow, and he was assumed to be the killer. But Andy had to walk away from the dead man to get cell phone service, and that was when he saw the hodag. It disappeared into the woods, but Andy was certain about what he had seen.

Morgan and her dog Newt were on their way to Rhinelander as soon as they could pack up, to see the crime scene before it gets covered in a fresh layer of snow. And as she is out there with Newt and Rita and Rita’s brother, she starts to wonder if it’s possible that a hodag killed the man after all. Because she sees one herself.

As Morgan tries to figure out what she saw in the woods, and who killed a man, she gets cryptic anonymous phone calls, someone tries to run her off the road, footsteps someone was watching her from right outside her hotel room, her car window gets shot out, the FBI searches her hotel room, and she thinks she sees her ex-boyfriend who murdered her parents. Even with her faithful service dog Newt, it will take everything Morgan has to make it back home alive.

Beast of the North Woods is book three in Annelise Ryan’s Monster Hunter series, and what it is that Morgan sees in Wisconsin is so much scarier than any cryptid, real or imaginary. These mysteries with the cryptid component are creative and fascinating, as it adds another layer of mystery to everything else going on in the story. And this story has a lot going on.

I thoroughly enjoyed Beast of the North Woods. I thought the mystery was layered with suspense and danger, and the twists were genuinely surprising. It was well researched and told with compassion and intelligence, not making fun of anyone who believes in cryptids but dealing with facts and data. There is not a lot of comic relief in these, but there is a gravitas and realness that echoes throughout the story until the end. This is a tribute to anyone interested in cryptozoology and loves a well crafted story.

Egalleys for Beast of the North Woods were provided by Berkley through NetGalley, with many thanks.