digging for the truth

Morgan Carter has spent her life looking for bigfoot. For all cryptids, actually. Her parents were fascinated by cryptids, and she traveled with them when they were on a case. So she grew up and became a cryptozoologist herself, and now she gets called in to consult on cases that police find hard to understand.

In Elkhorn, Wisconsin, a woman was found brutally beaten. She had been alone in the woods, close to where a local man had seen something unusual in the fields just days before. He’d been alone, dumped in the woods by coworkers who thought it would be funny, and he’d been drinking. But after realizing his friends had left him alone and cold in the woods, and then stumbling and hurting his ankle, he sobered up pretty quickly. So he was certain that what he had seen, a hairy creature on two feet, had been real. It just wasn’t anything he could readily identify. He had heard a howling just after seeing the beast, so he thought it was the local cryptid, the Beast of Bray Road. A werewolf.

Local police detective Wyatt Moorhead asks Morgan for help. It doesn’t help anyone to stir up the rumors about the Beast of Bray Road, but he can’t explain the scratches they found on the woman’s body or her car. So Morgan packs up a few essentials and her dog Newt and heads for Elkhorn. And while everyone is focused on the wounds on the woman’s body and what kind of creature could have made them, Morgan is focused on another question completely. What was this woman doing in the woods all alone in the middle of the night?

Morgan learns that the woman had been widowed by a car accident that had left her grown son in a wheelchair. She wanted to move somewhere that would be better for her son, but selling her house wouldn’t get her the kind of money she needed. So she was looking into potential income sources, including possible buried treasure that could be associated with notorious Chicago gangsters. Could that have been what she’d been doing in the woods that day? Morgan is trying to figure that out when she is startled to look up and see the creature for herself.

Could the woman’s murder really be the work of the Beast of Bray Road? Is it really a werewolf? Or will the killer turn out to be a creature even more deadly than that?

Monster in the Moonlight is the fourth book in Annalise Ryan’s Monster Hunter mysteries. Each of these books center on a different cryptid and a murder mystery, with lots of smart plotting and intriguing surprises along the way. This one is about the possibility of a werewolf in Wisconsin, and it goes to crazy places to find the answers.

I am a fan of these mysteries. I find cryptozoology fascinating, and I love the way Ryan approaches these mysteries, with skepticism instead of conspiracy. These are smart novels, with twists all the way through and a comforting dog to pet in case it gets a little intense. I loved how this mystery came together, and I can’t wait for the next one in the series. I will be sitting here waiting, with my fingers crossed that we finally get to my favorite cryptid, Mothman. But if we don’t get there yet, I’ll still be reading because these books are such fun.

Egalleys for Monster in the Moonlight were provided by Berkley through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.