I’m becoming rather an avid Will Dean fan and so I was delighted to be invited to participate in the blog tour for his latest book, Wolf Pack. My enormous thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to participate. I’m delighted to share my review of Wolf Pack today.

My review of Will Dean’s First Born can be found here, of Bad Apples here and of The Last Thing to Burn here.

Published by One World imprint Point Blank on 6th October 2022, Wolf Pack is available for purchase through the links here.

Wolf Pack

When there’s a pack on the hunt, nobody’s safe

A closed community

Rose Farm is home to a group of survivalists, completely cut off from the outside world. Until now.

A missing person

A young woman goes missing within the perimeter of the farm compound. Can Tuva talk her way inside the tight-knit group to find her story?

A frantic search

As Tuva attempts to unmask the culprit, she gains unique access to the residents. But soon she finds herself in danger of the pack turning against her – will she make her way back to safety so she can expose the truth?

Will Dean’s most heart-pounding Tuva Moodyson thriller yet takes Tuva to her absolute limits in exposing a heinous crime, and in her own personal life. Can she, and will she, do the right thing?

My Review of Wolf Pack

I was late to Will Dean’s Tuva Moodyson series, but my goodness I’m glad I’ve found it. What is so wonderful is that you know Will Dean is going to write a compelling plot interwoven with pitch perfect descriptions of settings through varied and gorgeously crafted prose. I adore in particular the short, simple sentences that are packed with nuance and meaning, pulling the reader up short. Wolf Pack is no exception and has all these features in spades, including those end of chapter hooks that don’t allow the reader to tear themselves from the story. It doesn’t matter at all that this book is part of a series because there’s enough reference to Tuva’s back story to inform the reader, without interfering with the coherence of narrative, making Wolf Pack a fabulous stand alone read. There’s a filmic quality to the writing so that the reader gets the full range of settings from a single drop of blood on the floor to a panoramic view of an entire region.

The plot simply races along, catching the reader unawares and engaging them completely. However, aside from a fast paced and exciting thriller, there’s a strong undercurrent of emotion that runs through this latest Tuva book, giving moments of surprisingly effective tenderness that brought a lump to my throat. There’s a realistic exploration of grief and how it can affect us through the members of the Rose Farm community, but especially through Tuva’s relationship with Noora. Will Dean illustrates a compelling insight into guilt, identity and acceptance that I found very affecting.

Tuva is such a rounded, layered character that it is impossible not to be attracted to her. Her blend of strength and vulnerability is absolutely pitch perfect. Through her the reader gets to understand small town, isolated lives and gains a terrifyingly prescient insight into cults, preppers and those whose lives are slightly askew from the rest of us. Each aspect is so convincing that I’ve found the concepts underpinning Wolf Pack resonate disturbingly long after the book is finished.

Taut, claustrophobic (literally at one point) and atmospheric, Wolf Pack is so, so good. I truly resented life intervening when it prevented me accompanying Tuva as she tried to determine how Elsa died. I cannot recommend Will Dean’s writing strongly enough. Wolf Pack is a fabulous addition to his body of work and I loved it.

About Will Dean

Will Dean lives in the middle of a vast elk forest in Sweden, where the Tuva Moodyson novels are set. He grew up in the East Midlands. After studying Law at the LSE, and working in London, he settled in rural Sweden and built a wooden house in a boggy clearing, where he lives with his wife and son, and it’s from this base that he reads and writes.

Will Dean is the author of Dark Pines, Red Snow, Black River and Bad Apples in the Tuva Moodyson series. His debut novel in the series, Dark Pines, was selected for Zoe Ball’s Book Club and shortlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker prize. The second, Red Snow, won Best Independent Voice at the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards and was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2020, as was his third novel, Black River. The series is in development for television. Will is also the author of two stand-alone novels, The Last Thing to Burn, shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2022, and First Born, both published by Hodder.

Will Dean posts regularly about reading and writing on YouTube and you can find him on Twitter @willrdean, Instagram and Facebook.

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