Review: Target of Interest

Target of Interest
Legend of Ahya Book 1
Matthew Colvath

Darkflamewolf Media
April 2021

Print Edition $19.98 (Amazon)
Ebook Edition $9.99 (Amazon)

“Tailmaws” are one of the quirkier things I’ve come across in my years in furry. They’re exactly what they sound like: maws at the ends of tails, usually big fluffy tails, generally capable of swallowing human-sized critters whole. Unsurprisingly, they’ve got strong associations with vore.

I’m hardly against stories that treat vore as a kink, whether in sublimated or flagrant fashion, but it can be fascinating to step back and say, in effect, “But what if we treat this seriously, and see what kind of stories we get out of it?” That brings us to Target of Interest, the first book in the Legend of Ahya series. (There are six books planned in the series, and they’re not short books!) Taylor Wolford is a teenaged wolf girl, on the run when we meet her at the story’s start, being chased by unknown pursuers—not for the first time:

Taylor chanced a look back, and could see the two wolves pushing and shoving people aside, their dogged sights set firmly on her. She was on the run again—from who or what, it didn’t matter; they were all the same. They just wanted to use her for experiments or harm her in some other ungodly way. She remembered the one time she got caught, and the pain she experienced then was unbearable. She would not allow it to happen again.

Why she is being chased? Because of the titular Ahya: her tailmaw. The mute Ahya is effectively a character unto herself, sometimes cooperating with Taylor, other times demonstrating stubbornness and, possibly, even her own agenda. Taylor was, as far as she knows, born with Ahya, and while she can control Ahya most of the time—under most circumstances, Taylor just looks like a wolf with an unusually large tail—sometimes Ahya takes matters into her own, er, gullet.

While Taylor/Ahya is wanted for multiple murders, none of the people chasing her are law enforcement. The first group chasing her wants to bring her to a mysterious person known as “The Arbiter,” a renegade member of the land’s ruling High Council. The Arbiter is (apparently) a technomagical Dr. Moreau, experimenting on others including his own family, and there are suggestions he’s created other beings with tailmaws—but Taylor is unique in having been born with Ahya. Another group is in pursuit of both Taylor and the first group, dispatched on order of the Council themselves. And, the Arbiter’s daughter, a hybrid reptilian, is also in pursuit of Taylor, ostensibly also at the behest of her father. Why? Perhaps he doesn’t trust the first group; perhaps Ari, his daughter, has her own agenda.

Colvath’s biggest strengths are in the world-building of the story. While I couldn’t help but pick up a D&D-ish “questing adventurers” vibe—early scenes of open markets, meetings in taverns, and walled cities just add to that—the technology level is comparable to our world’s. There’s a widespread religion whose central tenet is the idea that everyone has a capital-S Script which foretells the time, place and manner of your death, but not everyone wants to know their script, and the infallibility of the Script is called into question as Target of Interest progresses. And we haven’t even gotten to the behemoths, giant metal steampunk creations that flatten and incinerate cities. Are the behemoths the creation of the Arbiter? Of the High Council? Of a separate group?

There are lot of moving parts to this story: a lot of characters, a lot of places, a lot of competing interests. All the major characters are well-developed, and none of them are either pure evil or unalloyed good. The story’s clearly building to an epic confrontation that Taylor will, presumably, not only be caught up in but very likely key to.

Yet, I found myself somewhat less engaged with the novel as it went on. I think in part it’s because it gets progressively more exposition-heavy; we tend to learn about characters when they tell each other their backstories, or sometimes when they’re reviewing their own backstories in their heads. At some points this is less revelatory than underline-y, as if they’re turning to the camera and saying you understand, right? I’d have liked a bit more of this to be left for us to read between the lines.

But the larger issue is the climax: there kind of…isn’t one.

Yes, I know it’s the first book in a series and was planned as such from the start. But that doesn’t get individual books off the hook for their own three-act structure—their own inciting incidents, rising and falling tension, and especially their own climax and denouement, which crucially has to be driven by the protagonist’s actions. Taylor is by no means passive, but she rarely gets to take control of her own direction beyond reluctantly allying with one or the other of the groups trying to abduct her. I can’t help but think of Induction, also the first book in a series whose main character is a super-powered young wolf woman whose life starts out largely under the control of others: Induction is clearly just the start of Volta’s story, but it’s also a fully-formed tale in and of itself. As much happens in Taylor’s story—and make no mistake, a lot does—this first novel feels like the first act, and maybe not the entire first act at that.

Even so, there’s much about Target of Interest to like, and it ends on a note intriguing enough it might have sold me on picking up the second book in the series. If Taylor and Ahya sound interesting, get a free sample from the ebook distributor of your choice and see what you think.

While I linked to the Amazon storefront, the Legend of Ahya books are available from most major online retailers, in both print and ebook. I purchased mine from Kobo.