I read Need to Know after a string of pretty good but not incredible thrillers — the kind I could tell were well-crafted yet failed to keep me hooked 100% — and I was beginning to wonder if I was suffering from thriller burnout. Need to Know was just the cure I needed. I found myself devouring the book on the subway, on my lunch breaks and late into the night, and it was an incredible page turner.

Vivian Miller, a CIA counterintelligence analyst investigating a potential Russian sleeper cell in the States, makes the horrific discovery that one of the sleeper agents she’s investigating is someone she knows. The greatest achievement of her professional career forces Vivian to confront an impossible ethical dilemma, between her loyalty to her country and her loyalty to the people she loves. Need to Know is told at a breakneck pace, with one twist and revelation after another, and it was such a fun ride.

More than that, however, I loved how the story highlighted an experience that many professionals in high pressure jobs likely face: the tension between their personal life and their professional one. Cleveland does a great job in painting a picture of the duality in Vivian’s life, with both the professional and the personal aspects being equally important. Even though we later learn that investigating Russian operatives wasn’t necessarily Vivian’s dream job, she clearly takes pride in her work and has great talent for it. Equally important is her role as mother and wife, and I love how Cleveland makes it clear how much Vivian loves her family and her life with them, such that putting this part of her life in jeopardy for the sake of her job or even for the sake of her country is no easy decision.

Author Karen Cleveland is herself a former CIA analyst, and maybe that’s part of why she’s so good at creating such a twisty and exciting thriller. While the final twists weren’t much of a surprise to me, it did take me until fairly close to the big reveals to figure them out, and the experience was just a lot of fun. I can imagine this book being turned into an action thriller movie, or some Netflix show with a Jack Bauer 24 vibe. I highly recommend this to fellow thriller lovers.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Science writer Laura Reagan travels to Roanoke Ridge, Oregon to search for her former teacher and mentor, Professor Berton Sorel. He was supposed to be filming a TV show about Bigfoot in the area, but went missing before filming could start. Laura’s own feelings about Bigfoot are complex — her father had been one of the most preeminent researchers of the subject before he died, and while she had fond memories of accompanying her father on his work, she often found herself having to defend her own work against the shadow of his reputation.

Roanoke Ridge is a quick and entertaining mystery, and I loved the character of Laura and her struggle against living under the long shadows of both her father and her mentor. I also loved Laura’s friendship with Saad, who went with her to Roanoke Ridge. Part of me wishes there was a bit more clarity about who Saad was in general, as I had initially thought he was her assistant, but his haplessness at some of their escapades made me wonder what his role actually was. Regardless, I enjoyed reading about him as a character — I related a lot to his reactions during their hike around Oregon to find Professor Sorel.

The mystery may have begun as being about one person’s disappearance, but as reports of Bigfoot sightings start coming in, and people are starting to get hurt, Laura realizes that Sorel’s disappearance is part of a larger mystery. Roanoke Ridge hides a secret that goes back years, and there are people who would go very far to make sure it stays hidden. The Bigfoot sightings themselves aren’t as thrilling as I’d hoped, though that may just be because of my own skepticism.

Mostly, I think I watched too many Scooby Doo cartoons, so every time someone mentioned Bigfoot, I kept imagining the big reveal of the Scooby gang lifting off a rubber head and the bad guy calling them ‘pesky kids.’ Unfortunately, with such an association, it takes quite a bit more atmosphere for me to actually suspend disbelief and feel the fear the characters must have been undergoing, or alternatively, quite a lot more camp for me to go full-on Scooby Doo hilarity, and Roanoke Ridge didn’t quite get to either.

Still, I like how that subplot turned out, and particularly how it challenged Laura to question the people she thought she knew and events she thought remembered. It kept the story personal, such that it was easy to understand why Laura cared so much about uncovering the truth.

Roanoke Ridge is the first in a series, and it’ll be interesting to see where Dupuis takes Laura’s story from here.

The Wolf is absolutely incredible! I highly, HIGHLY recommend it, especially for animal lovers. Nate Blakeslee does a great job crafting a true-to-life drama around the wolves in Yellowstone, particularly a kick-ass female wolf named Oh-Six. This is by far the best book I’ve read a long time (I’d say the best this year, but I read it late January).

It has been touted as “Game of Thrones, but with wolves,” and certainly, there is something of Khaleesi’s kickassery in Oh-Six. I loved reading about how she started her own pack after being turned away by the other packs in Yellowstone. There’s a great passage where Blakeslee talks about how she entices a couple of young male wolves over to her, and how she peed against a tree to mark her territory and they both peed on the same spot to mark themselves as hers. I also loved reading about the wars for territory, with Oh-Six’s pack going up against other, sometimes more established packs, and how things like illness can totally shift the power dynamic. I especially love that while Oh-Six is clearly the heroine of the book, Blakeslee also talks about some of the other packs and animals in the area, giving us a broad brush picture of what life in Yellowstone is like.

Blakeslee creates almost a political thriller out of a nature documentary, and manages to do so without anthropomorphizing the wolves at all. I feel like I learned so much about wolves from this book, for example, that it’s actually very dangerous to be a lone wolf, because it makes you a target for other packs.

One of the biggest threats Oh-Six and the other wolves face is hunters. I have very strong views on hunting, and Blakeslee’s own opinion comes through fairly clearly, but I like how he takes care to present a balanced view. Most notably, he points out the families who live in the area and depend on elk meat for food and ranchers who raise livestock, and how both lifestyles are threatened by wolves who eat the elk and the livestock, and in one particularly sad scene, traumatized a pet dog.

But hunting for trophies still boils my blood, and the central hunter in this book is utterly unapologetic about what he does. What gets me the most is that without human intervention, the wolves and elks and bears all settle into a nice, balanced symbiosis, where they’re killing each other for food, but at least at a reasonable number which keeps their populations more or less steady. The reason wolves and other animals are becoming endangered is because of the human hunters who upset the delicate balance. So ugh.

Since this is basically a biography of Oh-Six, the book’s ending can be expected to align with her own demise. The circumstances around her death were tragic, but I’m SO GLAD it led to some changes in legislation and an increased awareness of wolf welfare.

I cannot recommend this book enough, particularly if you love animals, nature documentaries or stories about wildlife. I absolutely loved it and now I’m hungry for more and similar stories. John Vaillant’s The Tiger is on my radar, and I’m open for more suggestions!

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This book is also published under the title American Wolf, though at the publisher’s Fall Preview, they said the Yellowstone wolves are actually Canadian, and were imported into Yellowstone to repopulate the area.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.