Black Wolf doesn’t pick up exactly where Red Queen (which I also rated four stars, though for different reasons) leaves off, but the same subject is on Antonia Scott’s mind now as then. So it stands to reason that Inspector Jon Gutierrez not only has his partner’s back in this endeavor, but that he’s also trying his best to shield his queen from all harm. That includes harm to herself. 

Sometimes that’s a thankless endeavor, or at least a fruitless one, especially since Antonia is convinced their last case is connected to what happened to her husband and that accepting no assignments until these phantoms have been run to ground is their story and they’re sticking to it. Well, they were sticking to it until a mafioso’s pregnant wife narrowly escaped being assassinated in a shopping mall and then vanished into the wind. Now their boss wants Scott and Gutierrez to find her. The thing is: There’s a lot of people looking for this woman, and they all seem to have different interests. 

Black Wolf is just as good as Red Queen, but for totally different reasons. The breakneck pace of Red Queen has slowed down a bit in exchange for a hurry-up-and-wait approach, because in this book there isn’t the ever-looming presence of a ticking clock bearing down on our characters and the plot. In my opinion, this is a good thing, because it allows us to get to know both Antonia and Jon more as people, which is a luxury we didn’t get in the first book. We learn about Jon, his loneliness, his struggles with being a queer man who’s large, and his longing for a loving relationship. We get to learn more about Antonia’s training, her feelings about her son and her fears about being a mother, her guilt and resentment surrounding the decline in her husband’s health, and her fears about becoming too reliant on Jon. The pacing suffers a little, but the story is interesting and a quickly developing subplot surrounding the entire Red Queen project kept things interesting around the perimeter. 

I’m going to be very interested in seeing how this trilogy ends. 

I was provided a copy of this title by NetGalley and the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.