A strange small man and his giant partner play tournament bridge and are deep into the drug trade. Anthony Silvo, a dogcatcher and normally a loner, finds himself falling in love with a beautiful and mysterious woman (“Standing on four legs in her fur,/ she is her own brand of beast”). Lark, the top dog in one of the packs who’s a lawyer in human form, has a master plan that may involve taking over the city from the regular humans. These creatures are in fact werewolves, men and women who can change into canine form at will (“Dog or wolf? More like one than the other/ but neither exactly”). The dark humor and grim story line will immediately draw in fans of other neo-horror novels.Barlow’s gut-wrenching, sexy debut, a horror thriller in verse, follows three packs of feral dogs in East L.A. It's also to Barlow's credit that the touching moments between the woman and Anthony work as powerfully as the most graphic violence in the story. Matthew Moffett of School Library Journal, 'ome readers might be initially intimidated by Barlow's free-verse poetry, but, after a page, they will be swept into the rhythm.Jackie Cassada of Library Journal, 'ritten in a free verse style that perfectly complements the action as it moves from slower-paced narratives to short, jagged scenes of graphic violence and heartbreak, this groundbreaking work commands attention from a wide audience, including genre fans and modern fiction aficionados.'.Kaite Mediatore Stover of Booklist, 's spicy as a taco, as relentless as the pounding surf, and as lulling as a moon-drenched beach, Barlow's hip werewolf saga is highly recommended for adults and YAs who just don't get all the fuss about Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series.'.Peabody is the cop that investigates the disappearance of Anthony's boss and is drawn into the dangerous games being played.Anthony is new to the dog-catching business and eventually falls for the unnamed female character.Lark is the leader of one of the packs.

The unifying thread of the novel is the protagonist Anthony, who opens the novel as a newly hired dog-catcher, scrambles through successive encounters with the other characters and (unlike many of them) survives, to close the novel as a shapeshifter dog. The novel's point of view shifts among many characters, shapeshifter and ordinary human alike, all striving to act upon incomplete information about each other to pursue their very different objectives. Sharp Teeth explores how those strategies succeed or fail as the packs stumble across each other and as ordinary humans stumble across the shapeshifters. The nature of the shapeshifter dogs leads them to organize in packs with a specific structure but from that starting point each pack develops in a distinctly different direction depending on the strategy the pack chooses to masquerade as humans in human society. That's as ancient and ignorant as any myth.

Sharp teeth by toby barlow