This is my fifth visit with Charles and Anna and it’s the best of the series so far. I started reading this spin-off series as a kind of filler while I waited for the next Mercy Thompson book to come out. By the fourth book‘Dead Heat’, that had changed. Although the two series share the same world and timeline and have an overlapping cast of characters, the Alpha and Omega series has developed a distinctive voice of its own. They’re not fillers anymore. They’re books I look forward to because I know that I’ll slip into them completely and learn more each time.

The Alpha and Omega books feel quite intimate. They’re very focused on Charles and Anna and how they see the world and each other. The two of them are very different and both of them sit just outside the typical range of werewolf supernatural types…