The Promise

The full moon glows as Boyd follows The Passion with a second chronicle about the Devoncroix pack, chieftains of a hidden race of werewolves secretly responsible for nearly every advancement in human civilization. Bereaved Hannah North has come to the remote Alaskan wilderness to mourn the death of her husband when she rescues a mortally injured male wolf from a helicopter crash. A hardbound book that she finds in the wreckage, which turn out to be the memoirs of Matise Devoncroix, reveals to Hannah that the stunning creature she has saved is Nicholas, heir to the recently assassinated Alexander Devoncroix, leader of all the werewolves. Nicholas, however, bitterly opposes Alexander's dream of peaceable werewolf-human coexistence. Hannah's efforts to save Nicholas, presently trapped in wolf form, counterpoint Matise's eerily hypnotic account of his own loving and vengeful relationship with Brianna, a powerful young female werewolf unable to change from human to lupine form. Matise's book also includes his reflections on the mingled history of werewolves and the humans they originally kept as beasts of burden, a symbiosis marred by the human proclivity for violence and treachery. Boyd's elegant, aristocratic werewolves are more convincing than her brutish humans, and her constant shifts between Hannah's narrative and Matise's memoirs can be creaky, but she makes the esoteric werewolf culture consistently and appealingly exotic, witty and sexy. Redolent with heightened olfactory imagery, this heady exploration of interspecies contact and uneasy accommodation should open the door to a whole litter of sequels. (Oct.)