Wolfsbane: Book One of the Mortlake Series, by David Longhorn. Scare Street, 2021

The first in the Mortlake series (of which I read the 3^rd one first…doh), this book, while interesting and suitably creepy, has some of the faults that all ‘origin issues’ do. The characters are new, undeveloped, and their abilities have to be explained, we’re being introduced to how the magic of this world works, and it’s shorter than the following books. But I felt Mortlake was well done, as was Tara- we get an extremely intense introduction to her.

We meet Tara as she is on a hike with her boyfriend. Lost, hungry, and wet with rain, when they come to a fence they decide to climb it as they feel it’ll be a shortcut. They are attacked, though, by creatures that Tara cannot recognize. Her boyfriend falls to the creatures, but Tara gets away, with no memory of how. In the ado surrounding her hospital stay and police questioning, someone slips her a business card with “Mortlake” on it. An internet search shows he’s a professor of myth and legend at Cambridge, with a side line in investigation of paranormal evenets. As an astrophysicist, Tara doesn’t put much faith in the paranormal. But between some things that happened when she was a teen, and the fact that the ‘wolves’ that killed her boyfriend didn’t look like normal wolves, she gives Mortlake a call.

Mortlake accepts her plea for help willingly- he’s already been looking into it. He swiftly pulls his helpers together and I’ll not give anymore or the whole thing will be spoiled. Suffice it to say that their skills, paranormal and physical, mesh into a unit that can face most things. I like that no one person- not even Mortlake- knows or does everything. It takes a village, I guess, to fight the paranormal.

Pretty good for number one in a series; I’ll give it four stars.