I’m closing 2025’s best books with “The Last Soul Among Wolves,” the second in Melissa Caruso’s “Echo Archives” series. (Well, I may not be closing 2025 with it, as there are two more weeks in the year and I’ve got an audiobook and a couple of print books on the go, so there will no doubt be more notches in my reading belt before New Year’s Eve, and maybe even a five-star-worthy one.)
“The Last Soul Among Wolves” returns to the world Caruso introduces in “The Last Hour Between Worlds,” where the layers of reality beneath our own bleed through in magical and dangerous ways, and a host of guilds — the Hounds, the Ravens, the Cats, and others — make their living by protecting the world from deadly forces, or by exploiting the mysteries of the Echoes. The narrator, Kembrel Thorne, is a Hound — a sort of detective dedicated to retrieving people who have slipped into one of the Echoes — who is on maternity leave from her guild but who finds herself drawn into an especially deadly mystery when her childhood friends are threatened by a soul-stealing curse. Also on the job is Rika Nonesuch, the Cat who has become much more than a rival for Kem and who has some deadly mysteries of her own to solve.
This novel plays with a “game between heirs” trope and a bit of a “locked room” mystery. Kem’s friends (including the swashbuckling Jaycel Morningray, my favorite of the supporting cast) have gathered at a dilapidated island mansion after the death of the mansion’s owner because they signed their names in a cursed book during a childhood dare; they’re joined by a few other potential heirs, and learn that their inheritance (which includes earning a magical wish) depends on them surviving the visits of a soul-stealing Deep Wolf and its mysterious lantern. There are powerful forces playing this game, too, putting their thumbs on the cosmic scale for their own inscrutable motives.
It owes quite a bit to “The Westing Game” and similar books and movies, and I caught more than a few hints of Yukito Ayatsuji’s “The Decagon House Murders” in the setting and characters. The general plot comes as no surprise to anyone who’s read a little Agatha Christie or seen some old mystery movies: we see a minor character or two killed off to convince us that the stakes are high, we learn that our detectives (Kem and Rika) may be working at cross purposes, and we discover that not all of the participants are who (or what) they claim to be. And a skillfully executed book of this kind would rise to three and a half or four stars to me.
What sets “The Last Soul Among Wolves” apart for me is the pacing, the characters, and the setting. Like “The Last Hour Between Worlds,” this book is a masterpiece of cliffhanger endings that compel the reader on to the next chapter. Even when we’re in the research phase of the investigation, where Kem is visiting the Raven guild to piece together the cursed inheritance’s story, information is doled out in little crumbs that made me want to learn just a little more and kept the story moving. And when the action gets going, with some frightening encounters in the Echoes and the climactic confrontation, the pages practically turn themselves.
The book picks up another star for the characters. There’s a growing romance between unlikely partners Kem and Rika that kept me intrigued, and the rapier-sharp bickering between them is delightful. Jaycel Morningray is a scenery-chewing drama queen who’s as quick with her wit as with her sword, and the diva Silena Glory balances the unapproachable ice queen with the wounded but ambitious striver. The dialogue sparkles, and the cross-purpose motives of the cast keep the plot sufficiently tangled to make it more than a cut-and-dried mystery.
What I really appreciate about “The Last Soul Among Wolves” (and “The Last Hour Between Worlds”) is that the world in which it’s set is complicated and fascinating, but we learn about it in dribs and drabs, and not in blocks of exposition. The reader is dropped into the middle of the complex interplay between Prime and its Echoes, between the guilds and the city’s power brokers, and between the semi-divine Empyreans and their mortal pawns, and we have to make sense of it along with the characters. It reminds me of how C.J. Cherryh presents the Chanur books: it’s a little disorienting and befuddling at first, but soon you’re picking up the way this world works and want to learn more about it as the action proceeds.
I’m looking forward to a third installment in the Echo Archives. I want to see the budding relationship between Kem and Rika bloom, I want to learn more about the guilds and the Echoes and the Empyreans, and I want to see more of Jaycel Moringray in action. I’d really like to close 2026 with another swashbuckling tale of dimension-hopping Hounds and Cats …
