David Alyn Gordon’s Rage of the Skinwalker is an ambitious blend of historical fiction, supernatural mystery, wartime thriller, and detective adventure. Set primarily in Arizona during World War II, the novel follows the Nightfall Detective Agency, whose members include a vampire, a werewolf, a witch, and a golem. Their world expands well beyond a typical paranormal investigation, though. Gordon builds the story around Japanese American incarceration, Navajo history, racism, wartime espionage, and a conspiracy involving powerful Americans with fascist connections. The opening murder of Nitis Begay gives the book an emotional mystery that simmers beneath the larger plot, while the experiences of Michiko, Saburō, Malia, Chayton, and their families give the historical events a personal dimension. Gordon clearly wants the supernatural material and the history to occupy the same world, and that combination gives the novel its distinctive personality.

I enjoyed the amount of everyday life Gordon puts around the larger historical events. The Japanese American characters aren’t treated simply as people waiting for the next injustice to happen. They fall in love, play baseball, get married, teach children, cook, argue with their parents, care for babies, and try to create communities under awful circumstances. The baseball scenes at Gila River are especially effective because they show how people hold onto identity and dignity through ordinary pleasures, even while surrounded by fences and guards. The same approach appears in the Navajo storyline, where supernatural abilities are connected to family history, cultural survival, and the fear that revealing those abilities could place an entire community in danger. That gives the skinwalker mythology a purpose beyond supplying monsters or action scenes. The book keeps returning to a compelling question: what does loyalty to a country mean when that country doesn’t always extend the same loyalty to you?

The closest popular comparison for me is Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Like Butcher, Gordon enjoys assembling supernatural characters with very different abilities, throwing them into investigations, and letting humor sit comfortably beside violence and horror. Tori and Mueller, in particular, have the kind of bantering, highly capable energy that should feel familiar to readers who enjoy Harry Dresden’s world. Gordon adds a much heavier historical component, though. Real figures including Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman share the stage with vampires, skinwalkers, secret organizations, and occult conspiracies, while historical details about incarceration camps, wartime racism, and Japanese American baseball are woven directly into the action. At times, that enthusiasm for history means characters explain events or political ideas more explicitly than they probably would in ordinary conversation, but it also makes the book unusually specific about its setting. Gordon isn’t using the 1940s as scenery. History is one of the main engines driving the story.

By the end, Rage of the Skinwalker has grown from a murder mystery into something much larger and darker. The investigation at Marana brings the detective story, the wartime conspiracy, the Japanese American storyline, and the skinwalker plot together, giving the last section a fast, pulpy momentum. The revelations surrounding Project Alessio also push the series toward a broader conspiracy that clearly isn’t finished when this case ends. What gives the book some weight after the action settles down, though, is its interest in justice, vengeance, survival, and who gets to decide the difference between them. Gordon allows his supernatural heroes to be messy about those questions, sometimes deliberately so. The closing chapters resolve the central case while opening the door to another international adventure, and that feels appropriate for a novel that approaches history as a landscape full of hidden corridors. Rage of the Skinwalker is lively, angry, historically curious, and unapologetically strange, with enough mystery and character work underneath the supernatural spectacle to make its world worth returning to.

Pages: 185 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0HDZDFG8N