Sometimes the Wolf
By Urban Waite 
(William Morrow)


A father-and-son relationship, perhaps broken beyond repair, fuels Urban Waite’s engrossing novel that skillfully exposes the complicated emotions that can stymie a once close family while also working as a superb action-adventure tale.

In “Sometimes the Wolf,” the sins of the father have rained down on Bobby Drake for 12 years. Bobby, a sheriff’s deputy in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, wonders what his life would have been like had his father, Patrick, the town’s former sheriff, not been sent to prison for drug dealing.

Patrick’s “whole identity wrapped up in the fact that he‘d smuggled drugs,” with Bobby forever trying “to distance himself from the father everyone could see within him.”

Bobby’s resentment boils when Patrick, newly paroled, comes to live with him and his wife. Bobby wonders if Patrick will continue his criminal ways, while his anger at his father threatens his already strained marriage. (AP)