I’m delighted to say McKenna Dean has published the second book in her Redclaw Origins series – Bishop’s Gambit – and it is every bit as good as the first book (which was Bishop Takes Knight). I loved it so much I am still zinging about it. Lord, it’s a great book.

About the series

Redclaw Origins: The year is 1955. Rebel without a Cause and The Seven Year Itch are playing in the movie theaters. The Chevy Bel Air is the most popular car in America. Gas is 25 cents a gallon and you can get a hotel room for $4 bucks. This flirty, fun series takes us back to the beginning and shows us how Redclaw Security got started.

If you like Gini Koch’s “Kitty” Katt alien series, you’ll love Redclaw Origins! It’s Bringing up Baby meets WH-13! It’s the X-Files meets Leave it to Beaver!

Bishop Takes Knight is a Top Pick at The Romance Reviews and a Crowned Heart of Excellence recipient at InD’Tale Magazine and has been nominated for a RONE Award! Bishop Takes Knight was voted Best Paranormal/SFF Romance in the 2020 New England Reader’s Choice Awards, Best Light Paranormal Romance in the 2020 PRISM awards, and is a Finalist in the Royal Palm Literary Awards!

They’re back and the fun–and trouble–is just beginning! Join Bishop and Knight as they must pose as a married couple to root out the strange disturbances occurring in an upscale suburban neighborhood! 

About the Book

Bishop’s Gambit (Redclaw Origins Book 2)

Newly-minted secret agent Rhett Bishop would rather face down a horde of angry wolf shifters or her father’s former mob contacts than accept her current assignment: pose undercover as a suburban housewife, complete with a husband, slippers, and pipe.

But after the debacle of her previous mission, Rhett has a lot to prove.

To redeem herself in the eyes of Redclaw Security, and to carry out her mission without distractions, she must table her budding relationship with Peter Knight while the two of them uncover the secrets of Forest Grove.

Armed with her trusty ray gun, her unique little dog, and Knight’s brains, Rhett is confident she can handle whatever the suburbs can throw at her.

Until they lob a curveball.

Available from Amazon and these other retailers.

What I thought about it

As I think I said about the first book in this series, McKenna Dean is why I still read paranormal shifter stories. Her Redclaw series of books are intelligent and fun, and this book, the second in the Redclaw Origins series, is sheer *class*.

McKenna’s books create a world where shifters live in a society with parallel structures, organisations and government to ‘normal’ (<- use of quotes is deliberate) folks. Some of the books are contemporaries, involving the members of one such organisation, Redclaw Security. This, though, is the second in a series showing us how Redclaw developed, set in the mid-1950s and mediated though a non-shifter’s eyes. It’s a period piece in terms of the world it depicts, but with a great many contemporary resonances.

In the Bishop books, neither heroine nor hero is a shifter, although both work for Redclaw. Rhett Bishop is keen to prove herself to Redclaw’s boss, to wipe out the debacle of the first book where she and love interest, scientist Peter Knight, found and then lost a cache of odd, possibly alien, artifacts. So when she and Peter are sent to the suburbs to play at newly-weds while investigating an outbreak of paranormal activity of the kind Redclaw is set up to manage, she takes on the task with her usual whole-hearted gung-ho energy, shaded with a strong sense that living in ‘Leave It To Beaver’-land is most definitely not a milieu in which she fits. She most definitely doesn’t. There is nothing suburban about Rhett Bishop.

Add her delightful terrier-cum-velociraptor into the mix while she and Peter deepen their romantic attachment as they hunt down more artifacts and untangle clues that lead her into a chilling confrontation with an ‘artifact’, and you get another wonderful episode in the series and an ending that has you yelling at your e-reader begging for Book Three.

Soon, Ms Dean. Please.

Very highly recommended.

About McKenna Dean

McKenna Dean has been an actress, a vet tech, a singer, a teacher, a biologist, and a dog trainer. She’s worked in a genetics lab, at the stockyard, behind the scenes as a props manager, and at a pizza parlor slinging dough. Finally she realized all these jobs were just a preparation for what she really wanted to be: a writer.

She lives on a small farm in North Carolina with her family, as well as the assorted dogs, cats, and various livestock.

She likes putting her characters in hot water to see how strong they are. Like tea bags, only sexier.

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