Monster Hunter Alpha continues Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series with all its trademarks: white-knuckle action, gritty gun details, wild swaggering characters on both the heroes’ and the villains’ side, and comic wisecracking in the best tradition of Hollywood action films.

Here, we get Earl Harbinger, MHI’s own inhouse badass werewolf, as protagonist.  Delightfully, we read two parallel stories: in the beginning of each chapter, we read Earl’s adventures as a young man.  Earl is bitten, transforms, and luckily falls under the zen-ascetic tutelage of a Spanish priest who helps him overcome his beast nature and become a warrior for good.

The main story follows Earl to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where a series of murders and a mysterious ancient amulet draw our werewolf hero into a three-sided showdown.  The Alpha, the leader of the global werewolf pack, wants Earl and an old Russian werewolf nemesis (who is insane and bloodthirsty, and also possessed by an even more insance and bloodthirsty demon) to destroy each other, before either can challenge him and replace him at the head of the pack.

Throw in a local deputy bitten and infected, MHI agents trying to kill Earl for a personal grudge, and independent PUFF bounty hunters who believe Earl has gone rogue and lost his exemption from the PUFF list, and you get a recipe for non-stop entertainment.

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