You'd think that a werewolf fighting Nazis would be even slightly fun. Not here. McCammon is a reliably good writer and he puts together engaging prose but he takes his pulpy premise so seriously that there's no room for what should be a rollicking adventure, something like Inglourious Basterds meets Dog Soldiers.

Instead, he writes what are essentially two different novels and awkwardly welds them together (maybe he has a lot in common with Tarantino after all). There's a relatively straight secret agent in WWII novel, where the main character is, yes, a werewolf, but it only seems to matter when McCammon is worried that we might have forgotten about it. In the climactic battle on a B-17 (a hell of an action sequence), the hero never changes. Neither love interest finds out his secret either.

The other book is the main character's origin as a werewolf, where he lives in the woods with the pack that changed him. He has some adventures that don't really connect plotwise or thematically with the WWII stuff. It really feels like padding, and this beast is like 600 pages. Padding was not something it needed.

This is a rare miss for McCammon, a stone-faced slog in what should have been a pulpy joy.