This is an amateur detective series. The lead character is an academic who is also a truth-seeker who spends his spare time and effort debunking paranormal claims. In this case, an academic disagreement with another professor who claims that cryptids (bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Hana K'ilo and others) are based in reality. When the adversarial professor goes missing in the middle of rural Alaska in winter, Harlan and girlfriend Vieve, wind up helping to track him down.
I wanted to like this book very much. It ticked a lot of my favorite boxes: amateur detective, academic, isolated setting, unexplained disappearances, and more. The premise of the book and the narrative story arc are very good, and the author has a good technical grasp of narrative tension. My problems came from the lack of cohesive editing which made it very tough going for me. I was often yanked out of the narrative by misspellings, badly mixed metaphors ("As he prepared to speak, emotional conflict rose in Harlan’s throat"), and lack of clarity in scene and character shifts. There was an awful lot of 'telling' and very little 'showing' with long paragraphs of info dumping. The characters weren't very well delineated; I kept mixing up his girlfriend Genevieve, and the grad assistant of the other professor who goes missing in the middle of Alaska (Raina).
I hadn't read the first book in the series and followed the action well enough. The book is readable as a standalone. The language is PG (a few damns, not much worse).
For Kindle Unlimited subscribers; the first book in the series is available in the KU subscription to borrow and download for free.
The author is undeniably talented. The narrative is very cinematic, with solid scene descriptions and a good tension arc. It's not a surprise to find he's a scriptwriter. With a ruthless editor, this could be a very good series.
Three stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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