UNLEASHED

After her mother's death Katelyn trades in Los Angeles for a backwoods Arkansas town where everything, all the way down to deaths, is wolf-themed.

Going from the city to tiny Wolf Springs is a huge transition for Katelyn. In her grandfather's corner of the Ozark Mountains, cell-phone reception is spotty and legends are plentiful. As the new girl, Katelyn takes the spotlight over from the last big news in town—the mysterious death of a local girl, believed to have been killed by animals in the woods. The mystery is transparently (and humorously) built through a book on the town's history that is missing a page: the one in between a warning of a creature in the woods more fearsome than the wolves and the line, "And thus it remains that our good company shuns the wooded hills." While Katelyn is courted by standard paranormal-romance suitors, it's her relationship with new BFF Cordelia Fenner that takes center stage. Even though Katelyn is being attacked and hunted, it's Cordelia's plot (which directly references the Cordelia in King Lear) that slowly takes over the novel. From the town-history book to the Shakespeare parallel, the story has little time for subtlety. Instead of solving the mystery, the ending adds additional complications for the sequel to tackle.

Enjoyable enough, but it doesn't stand out from the pack.