NAKED BRUNCH

Hayter sets aside her Robin Hudson female detective series (The Chelsea Girls Murders, 2000) to profile one Annie Engel: a mousy secretary by day, a werewolf by night.

Fading newsman Sam Deverell lucks into a story about a Mad Dog Murder and a victim attacked during a full moon outside the Carnivore restaurant in the Meat-Packing District; he’s the only reporter to grab a video of the body. Werewolf Jim, a ghostwriter by day, keeps his lycanthropic changes at bay by taking doses of ketamine with an intravenous drip and sleeping during the full moon, but he’s charged up by the Meat-Packing District murder and, going off ketamine, feels euphoric. Legal secretary Annie, a vegetarian who works for Synergy Enterprises Group, wakes up with blood on her chest, meat lodged in her teeth, nausea, a meatlike lump in her vomit, her purse lost, and her window broken in (by herself). Annie also finds all her senses sharpened at work. She can hear far-off conversations beyond the normal range of hearing, and she’s developing soft blond fur all over her body. Then there’s rudeness, distemper, lack of table manners. She finds herself four-footed and scampering over rooftops. Annie the werewolf tears out throats, then leaves her dead victims, seemingly without having refreshed herself on their blood or bodies—although she does find herself feeling much better by day, despite not quite remembering what she did the night before. According to Dr. Marco Potenza, who runs a clinic for fee-paying werewolves who want to be sedated during dangerous periods of the full moon (and is himself a werewolf), Annie suffers from Lyconthropic Metamorphic Disorder. When two Syn-GEN employees are murdered by the Mad Dog Killer, Annie wonders whether she can ever have a normal life again. The climax, Operation Harvest Moon, finds wolves scampering over many roofs in a wild chase.

Madcap nights of love among the lycanthropes.