I picked up a copy of Amy Green’s Rebel Wolf when it was free on Amazon. It was still free at the time of posting.

Description from Goodreads:
Ian Donovan lives a life on the edge. The bastard son of an alpha, he’s a lone wolf fighting to survive in the Colorado wilds. No pack. No code.

Until the woman showed up.

Anna Gold studies shifters – their secret rituals, their renegade lives. Everyone knows shifters are untrustworthy and deadly, especially in the hard-luck, shifter-only town of Shifter Falls. But Anna has never met a wolf until the day she springs Ian from prison to study him.

Not only is Ian so hot he’s a distraction, he’s definitely dangerous. And he’s the wrong guy to fall for. Because the pack alpha is dead. A new leader must be chosen. An Ian’s three brothers want to kill him for it. No one said life in the Falls was easy…

Review:
This is pretty standard shifter paranormal romance. There isn’t a lot to make it stand out as superb or unusual. But for being bog standard PNR it does what it does quite well. The writing is good, the editing non-distracting, the dialogue smooth, the characters likable and the romance not insta-love (though being so short it doesn’t have a lot of time to develop). What I liked most was that Ian and Anna never played coy, dragging out a lot of misunderstandings and hidden feelings. She was willing to ask the obvious questions and he was willing to give honest answers about his feelings. That was quite satisfying.

As always, I thought the need to make the bad guy threaten to rape the heroine was unneeded. I really don’t understand why authors think they HAVE to make a villain a sexual deviant to make him evil. I mean, being a murder is enough all by its self. But somehow the heroine in such books always has to almost get raped. This is a trope I could do without, but seems to be as expected in the plot as a HEA. It’s so common I’m tempted to call it cliched, and how sad is that?!

For the most part, however, I enjoyed the book and I’d be willing to read more of the series.

Edit: As an aside, concerning the cover, I know it’s a small thing and authors don’t always have a lot of control over it, but when the character has very specific tattoos that are well described and play a part in the book, but the character on the cover has very different, non-related tattoos, readers notice. It’s a disconnect and annoying. Not to mention that the character is described as having longish hair, a beard and prominent scars on his back. People notice these things.