PLOT SYNOPSIS (from the back of the book)
       For seven thousand years, supernatural beings have existed in the shadows alongside humanity. Even for vampire Talon, seven thousand years is a long time. She plays errand girl for the supernatural queen, if just to pass the time. But when one of these “errands” reveals the resurrection of a long dead, genocidal cult responsible for the death of thousands of supernaturals and humans alike, Talon’s boredom is replaced by gut wrenching terror.
      Talon and her two friends team up with nomad Jesse after the cult kidnaps his sister. Who and what he is remains a burning question in her mind. But all that matters to her is protecting what is most important: family. And she’ll be damned if anything or anyone destroys it again.

THE BOTTOM LINE
If you enjoy this genre, this book is definitely worth a read.

THOUGHTS
Moonlight Howls is written for a specific audience. If you are part of that audience, you’ll probably enjoy it. Set in an urban fantasy world, it draws heavily on werewolf and vampire lore but doesn’t stop at a generic setting. There is a lot to the world as seen through snippets of information and flashbacks provided sporadically. Rather than info-dumping everything via inelegant exposition, Sampley restricts the reader to what they need to know so that everything makes sense while leaving more for the reader to discover. These pieces of information hint at larger truths and make the world feel much larger, especially when the story drifts to eccentric locations like the fae realm. The main characters are also engaging though not entirely consistent or logical. For example, while I can buy the fact that Talon is the de facto leader of the group since she is by far the oldest, the others yield to her opinion and guidance in every situation, even when they disagree. The practically demure deference they show her is very out of character for many of them. The villains are also generic and nearly faceless which doesn’t help the overall story much. Nevertheless, the action is well-written and the plot is engaging. The story twists and turns with an underlying mystery that is not obvious; in fact, it might be a bit too convoluted. Many clues are so obscure that they must be explained at the end of the book by way of an evil monologue which, even if it is called out in the book, is painfully cliché. However, the joy is in the journey with this book, and though the ending fudges the landing a bit, it is nevertheless an enjoyable read overall. This genre is really not for me, so I will not be reading the sequel; however, if you like the strong-female, romance-ish, urban fantasy, werewolf and vampire genre, this might be your next favorite series.

RANTS AND RAMBLES
NOTE: Though I strive to adequately support the opinions expressed in my reviews, they are still just opinions. If you like a book I hate, I’m happy for you. Additionally, while I regularly rant about mere irritants in a novel, something must be remarkably good to garner the same level of comment. This means my rants and rambles often skew more negative than I intend my review to be, so please refer to my overall star rating for my unified opinion on this book.

• The writing of this book is not so bad as to diminish enjoyment of the reading, but it does have some problems. General tense mismatching, incorrect punctuation, and lots of sentence fragments exist. Additionally, I suspect that this book was originally written in first-person-present-tense and later changed to past tense. A lot of stuff got missed in the process, so there is a bunch of tense mismatching.
• A simple warning that though this book does not have what I would consider smut, it certainly has several passages that are smut-adjacent. Definitely heed the 16+ age recommendation.
• BARELY A SPOILER: A werewolf’s pack shares an instantaneous mental link whereby when one sees something, they all see it. This feels like it should fundamentally shape everything the pack does from information gathering to fighting, but it doesn’t seem to. Additionally, during the course of the book, two pack members go missing, and the pack doesn’t even know if they were captured, killed, or something else. I fail to see how this is possible given the pack’s mental connection.
• MINOR SPOILERS: One huge consistency issue crops up when the crew flies from Alabama to Stockholm. Talon can’t buy out the whole plane, so she just buys out first-class. She also uses a ton of cash to bribe the cabin crew to overlook “the wanted posters.” But the flight involves four stops, so wouldn’t that be four cabin crews to bribe? Plus, anyone in the airport could notice her, so wouldn’t it make more sense to just utilize a disguise? Then there is the financial side of things. A first-class, one-way ticket on a similar flight runs about $10k, so it seems like chartering a private jet for around $90k would have been cheaper than booking every first-class seat. It would probably have been easier and safer as well. Interestingly, she didn’t have enough money to buy amusement park tickets a few chapters earlier, so I’m not sure where the massive influx of cash came from.
• SPOILERS: I like the fae kingdom with the hints as to its politics and the civil war raging there. The whole situation creates a nice division of the action when the crew must venture into this new milieu. On the other hand, side quest undertaken in this location seems to serve no purpose but to clumsily introduce the Foresaken mutation and teach one of the characters magic on an expedited timeline. Given the nature of the fae, I am disappointed that this scenario didn’t cost the main characters anything and that it didn’t factor into the story in an incredibly meaningful way.
• SPOILERS: Other consistency issues include: a town being an hour away by walking despite the fact that Talon can use vampire speed; a ladder’s bottom rung being 6 feet from the floor means that they can’t get out this way, but werewolves and vampires should be able to make the jump easily; Damicén doesn’t want to “translate” the word “jackass” despite not having a problem dropping the f-bomb from time to time; the main characters avoid saying Grant’s name, à la Voldemort, but once the reader finds out what it is, they seem to have no such aversion (also à la Voldemort).