Review: Full Moon Knights by Matthew Danza

FF’s Star Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Full Moon Knights (Book Three of the Fin Series) is another adventure horror novel by Matthew Danza featuring the venomous shark slayer Lee Elizabeth Kager as the lead character. She is a bit out of it and initially, an all new level of crazy. Danza, however, gets the ball of excitement rolling quickly, giving Lee a different type of monster to combat, steering this beautiful shark hunter towards breaking the boundaries of magic and folklore.

Lee, now attending Columbia University and member of its archery club, gets contacted by Andy, the son of Charlie Lockhart, a billionaire tycoon, who has a proposal for her. Heather, Andy’s mother, has a notable past involving archaeology. A cancer survivor, she had been a secretive person and, in her profession as an archaeologist, didn’t make any notable findings although she had been onto a couple of things. Andy is out on a personal mission of finding an artefact in Spain known as the Somme Spear, an object that carries with it it’s own amusing account and magical properties. He contacts Lee to help him find it. While tracking this magical spear down, what stands in their path are werewolves. They now have to fight for their lives if they want to find the spear.

Danza starts his novel off with the following quote by Deepak Chopra: “In the process of letting go, you will lose many things from the past, but you will find yourself”. There is a strong connection to be made between this line by Chopra and the point at which Lee finds herself currently. Humorously, when we meet Lee in the beginning, she is in the process of getting committed as a friend named Jen jokingly alerts her. Missing one leg due to a shark attack, she is seen doing some precarious behavior, running around town with a bow and arrow and affirming that she is with her boyfriend who is deceased. Suffice it to say, Lee has trouble dealing with her past, but will she become stronger to a point where she can let go of it?

Unable to dismiss anything carelessly, Jennifer Marie Fabiani, who has written a book that has done extremely good on the charts, is pretty useful to Lee as a friend. A former cop and now an author, Jen ‘s usefulness also comes in doing a background check on Andy Lockhart. A cancer survivor, Andy’s mother died due to an overdose around the time that he was thirteen years of age. He eventually ended up in an all-boys Catholic boarding school along with his cousin Zack. These two became well acquainted and joined the Airforce together. In 2015, Zack lost his life during a military exercise in Libya.

The author’s initial problem is setting his shark heroine on a path towards discovering something more out of this world. At first, she is a big skeptic when it comes to magic. It is something that she doesn’t initially believe in, but she is open minded. Especially when it comes to this spear that might be able to restore her. Andy has told her that this spear can get her leg back. I must admit that this sounds really unrealistic at first, but Lee seems to go along with this idea with ease. The spear does have it’s own interesting background: made from materials unknown to man, its origin is placed during World War One in 1916.

Enticing Andy about Lee further is her unusual resemblance to a woman named Vesper. The author writes that they were like twins separated by time. While having dinner before setting off for their hunt, Andy tells Lee that Vesper is the wife of Edmond Castilla, the Duke of Spain. He also shows her a photo which was taken in the early nineteen hundreds; she cannot deny the resemblance.

They are called the Untamed. The werewolf creatures that threaten Andy and Lee’s lives. “A subject that has been bitten by The Untamed will share their common traits within minutes.” Andy eventually gets bitten, and it is here that the novel takes an interesting turn as the man is in danger of turning into this abomination himself. He does have his moments, however. Andy has a memorable line that he utters, sort of lame to Lee, before using a firearm. One question that springs to his mind while he is concerned about turning into a werewolf is whether he will be able to control his actions if he does turn into one of them.

Readers can become quickly confused because of some settings that are not defined with precise precisian, but the main plus point remains the lingering eery feel that the author creates. Lee’s philosophy is a bit humorous and crazy: “Just fiddle with things until they worked.” This is a sure hit on her appeal as a heroine. Danza also makes the mistake of portraying her as this extremely silly person that would reach into her fanny pack to give protein bars to canines while calling herself mommy. This heavily conflicts with her ability to survive dangerous circumstances: as she combats a werewolf in one particular scene, she is quite vicious, she smiles maliciously while snapping its fingers back.

The last bits were rounded off smoothly. The novel reads partly like a mystery novel in which the true answers are only revealed at the end. The author leads his heroine on a path towards discovering a shocking truth and even a genius contraption of sorts that gets her thinking about her dead boyfriend. The eeriness of the novel is enough to make you fear what creeps in the dark. A read best enjoyed with as many lights on as possible.

Matthew Danza surprises with the mental smarts and determined fight of a woman haunted by her past and loved ones that she has lost to unusual circumstances. Readers are bound to encounter the most mystifying of characters. Meant for those that are fascinated by the possibility of having lived in a previous time and the mechanics of the legendary werewolf.